


If You Get a Big Enough Bookshelf, Gravestones Could Be Your Bookends

by Game_Changer



Category: Gintama
Genre: Critical Hippos, Egyptian Rivers, Humor, M/M, Schrodinger's Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2020-08-19 18:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20214613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Game_Changer/pseuds/Game_Changer
Summary: He doesn’t believe in ghosts, really. He might be the tiniest bit afraid of them though.Gintoki’s side of Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains. [Complete]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story probably won’t make a whole lot of sense if you haven’t read [Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13190820/chapters/30172617). That link will take you there if you want to dive into that one first.
> 
> You don’t have to read it though. You can be confused if you want to. That’s your right. Just don’t come crying to me in the comments to this fic asking who Hijikata is or something. You would know if you read that other story (or some obscure little series called Gintama).
> 
> And for anyone interested in pairing wine with their food, this chapter goes well with the shittiest rosé you can find at 7-Eleven and Chapters 1-2 of Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains.

When Gintoki saw Otose walking down the street carrying the wrapped box that, try as it might, could not contain the incredible smell of the freshly steamed meat buns hidden within, he didn’t hesitate in snatching her umbrella. The old hag shifted the box from one wrinkled hand to two, glaring at him even as her strained shoulder already began lowering and relaxing under the lightened load.

“I’ll carry this if you give me those after,” he offered bluntly.

“It’s not up to me,” she said as they walked in step under the shelter of the umbrella through the snow. “You know that.”

He did know that. He also knew that who it was up to tended to be rather agreeable when it came to his requests. Dead people always were.

A half hour later, as Otose knelt in front of Terada Tatsugorou’s grave, gingerly wiping away the snow, Gintoki, holding the umbrella above all three of them, confirmed that Terada had indeed agreed to give him the meat buns. He was halfway through one by the time Otose lifted her head to look his way. He met her disapproving glance with an unrepentant shrug, refusing to let on that this first big bite was in the middle of burning multiple layers of skin off the roof of his mouth. He was breathing steam.

By the subtle, upward quirk of her lips, he could tell she had caught on anyway.

Returning to her cleaning, she simply said, “Well, have at it then.”

The second bite was somewhat less painful than the first – but that might have had more to do with the general numbness that had settled over his mouth than for any other reason. Where did the old hag cook these things? In the center of the sun?

He grabbed a pile of snow and shoved it on his tongue when he was sure she wasn’t looking.

“I suppose I am a bit surprised,” Otose said suddenly, her back still facing him.

Was that directed at the dead guy or him? Gintoki couldn’t tell.

“It’s not like you to take things from my late husband without giving him something in return,” she continued.

Ah, that was for him. 

“Who said that was what I was doing?” Gintoki responded once he swallowed the snow.

“So you are giving him something then?” 

Kneeling down next to her in front of the grave, he grabbed another meat bun and ripped through it with a rough bite. The temperature was no better this time around, but he swallowed it anyway. Now, it had become a matter of principle.

He turned so that his back was facing Otose and patted it.

“I told him I’d give you a piggy back ride home,” Gintoki declared.

Her foot hit his ass hard enough to send him flying face first into the nearby snowbank. He took the opportunity to chew up another secret mouthful of mercifully chilled snow before getting up and shaking off.

“Don’t make stupid promises with my husband,” she said. 

“Too late for that. I’ve already made a bunch.”

For a man Gintoki had never met, they sure had exchanged a great deal of words and commitments. Some people might find it hard to strike up a rapport with the dead – particularly if dead was the only state you had ever known them. However, unlike some people, Gintoki had been around the more violent blocks enough times to get a grip on the language of corpses – to know the meaning of their bloodless silence. 

It meant nothing. Absolutely nothing, in case anyone was wondering.

That was the secret.

Standing and lighting a cigarette, Otose observed her handiwork. The grave looked as good as new – give or take a decade or two. Or three.

“You can do better than a piggy back ride,” she finally said, sounding like she already had something in mind.

“Oh yeah?” he replied, willing to give her words an ear at the very least.

“Go and get someone to make you your own meat buns, so you can stop stealing Tatsugorou’s.”

Gintoki snorted. This stupid, wannabe-grandma always did stuff like this. One moment she was sending flame-throwing robots to collect the rent and the next minute she would be hassling him into going to the dentist because she noticed him only chewing on one side of his mouth. What business was it of hers if a couple of his teeth decided to rot out of his gums?

She should stick with what she was good at: getting old drunks to drink her shit and looking wrinkly.

“I’ll have you know that I can make my own meat buns just fine, as long as I have the money to pay for the ingredients,” he announced.

Even with just a pile of dirt and sticks he could easily make a dish that wouldn’t end up sending someone to the hospital for third degree mouth burns, so at least he had that going for him.

“Well then,” Otose replied easily, “go and get someone with a big enough wallet so that you can make your own meat buns and stop stealing Tatsugorou’s.”

Sure, everyone could dream. Everyone could look at their TV and think that one day Ketsuno Ana would step right out of it and smile at Gintoki and say, ‘I want all of the money and power I have amassed from being an incredibly talented and cute weather girl to go toward making you happy.’ That was the easy part. 

“It’s not a half bad idea,” he agreed. “Some loaded gal who would buy me some buns and let me use hers. Your guy has some good sense about him, if he is making that sort of request of me.”

If Terada just wanted him to daydream in exchange for his meat buns, that was certainly something Gintoki could do. He did it already, so it wouldn’t even require him to vary from his usual routine. 

“Then it’s settled,” Otose declared as they began their walk back to the Snack Bar. “You’ll find someone to buy your buns.”

* * *

“Patsuan,” Gintoki spoke up after a good fifteen minutes of silent hammering. “I think I’m being punked by a ghost.”

Shinpachi dropped his own hammer, and, in the process of diving to get it, broke two more roof tiles in half, and cracked a third.

“I’m not fixing those,” Gintoki added.

He was already struggling to keep hammering through his hangover as it was. It was like there was an arm hammering his brain alongside his actual arm hammering the roof, and the two arms were in an ever-escalating hammering competition that could only end with him falling off the roof and hammering his head into the dirt.

“Are you getting heat stroke?” Shinpachi finally asked.

“I’m not stroking, I’m hammering,” Gintoki corrected. 

Sometimes that kid had far too much trouble reading the room – or roof, as it were.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Shinpachi snapped, and thrust a limp white towel and lukewarm water bottle in his direction.

Gintoki took the water, downing it quick enough, while eyeing the towel.

“Not _that_ kind of ghost.” He gestured toward it. “I’m not talking about some white sheet floating around. This one’s more the invisible, figurative, vengeful kind. I stole his meat buns,” he admitted.

That was the only explanation he could come up with for what the Shinsengumi’s Vice-Stooge had done in that bar last night. Mr. Mayo had sat there like a dumbass and confessed his undying devotion to Gintoki mere hours after Gintoki had taken Terada’s meat buns. How could any rational person not think the two of those things were inextricably connected?

Not that it mattered, really. As beyond-the-grave curses went, this one was actually pretty tame. He just needed to ignore it and then it would in no way affect his life. Hijikata had even said he wouldn’t bring it up again, so that made things easy.

Yeah, this was simple. So simple. So incredibly simply simple.

It was simple, dammit!

“That asshole is going to have to do a lot more than that to make me regret stealing his buns,” Gintoki announced while really, genuinely hoping that Terada wasn’t listening in. In case he was, Gintoki shifted his head to the side and murmured out of the corner of his mouth Shinpachi couldn’t see: “I’m kidding. You’re a great, scary ghost. Please stop haunting me.”

Without breaking eye contact, Shinpachi put his headphones on in one firm, decidedly bitchy motion, and, with an Otsuu pop ballad blaring, turned away to resume his hammering.

* * *

Gintoki sneezed himself awake with a sneeze so incredibly violent and unimaginably powerful that it had sounded like a string of words instead of a sneeze. 

It had sounded like he had screamed the words, “THAT SMILEY SON-OF-A-BITCH,” when in reality it had been a sneeze that went Super Saiyan, as happens with the chosen nose once every thousand years. It is a true honor and a rough responsibility to be the owner of that nose. You can’t just decide how a Super Saiyan sneeze will actually manifest its great power, which is why things like this happen.

He explained this to Kagura who had ripped open his door in response to the loud sneeze, looking aggressively grumpy and wholly unamused.

“If it only happens once every thousand years, why has this been your stupid excuse the last three nights in a row?” she accused, flicking a crusty booger at him.

“It’s powering up,” Gintoki explained as he ducked underneath the projectile. “You know how Vegeta needs to go through a lot of yelling and close ups from different angles that cover a bunch of panels and ‘To Be Continued...’s at the ends of chapters to get to that next level sometimes? My nose is going through the same thing. I’m not sure how many nights it will take.”

“Why can’t you just admit you’re having nightmares about a scary clown?” Kagura asked. “Maybe once you acknowledge the ‘smiley son-of-a-bitch,’ it’ll go away. At least, it better,” she emphasized, “because if you don’t figure this out soon, I’m going to have to punch you hard enough at the beginning of each night that even clowns won’t wake you up until it’s the next morning.”

She really would, too. Gintoki didn’t doubt it.

“Actually, my nose is all powered up. I’m sure of it. I’m done sneezing, okay?” he said, because it seemed like the thing to say, whether or not it would actually end up being true.

Kagura appeared to believe Gintoki as much as he believed himself in that moment, which wasn’t a whole lot. Grumbling under her breath, she stomped her way back to her closet, slamming it closed behind her roughly enough to make the rafters shake, which caused Sarutobi’s glasses to fall. 

They slipped off her nose, where they had been dangling precariously as she held her perch at the place where the corner of the wall of his room met the ceiling. Because her hands were too busy keeping her body suspended above him, she couldn’t use those same hands to grab the glasses. Instead, they clattered, ignominiously, to the floor.

As Gintoki got up to go to the bathroom, he kicked them aside.

Taking a piss, he found himself mulling over Kagura’s words. As much as he hated to admit it, it did seem like ignoring things wasn’t working out, so maybe it was time he faced them. 

His main problem was the face part, actually. The smile.

It just didn’t add up.

He could understand the mayo freak screaming his love for Gintoki to all that would listen in that bar that night, sure. Hijikata probably lost a bet to one of his goons, or got on one of those prank reality TV shows and brought a bunch of cameras to hide behind fake walls to record Gintoki’s reaction. That’s why Gintoki had been all stoic and cool through the whole thing. He wasn’t about to give the guy the satisfaction of a prank well done, because he saw through it all with ease. He had Hijikata’s number and it was a fucking zero, the loser!

But after that. After a century of just staring at him, Hijikata had ended it.

“You don’t have to worry. Unlike some stalkers out there, I only ask once,” he’d said and then he’d smiled that fucking smile. 

It wasn’t one of his standard smiles; contrary to popular belief, Mr. Sword-Up-His-Ass did actually have a couple of those. Gintoki could win a wry grin if he was being particularly witty a couple drinks in some evenings. Mayonnaise in any situation could always get a disgusting, glistening look of joy. But those smiles had nothing to do with _that fucking smile_. Gintoki had never seen that kind of expression on that face.

No. Wait a second. 

Gintoki paused in the middle of washing his hands.

Now that he was really giving all of this some thought, he realized he had seen it before. Once.

Where? When?

Why?

He couldn’t remember.

What he did understand was that this was where all his feelings of unease had been coming from. He had definitely seen that look before, and now it had happened again, and this time it had been directed at him. The memory, the context of why this was unsettling was out of his reach, but something kept nudging at him – poking and prodding. 

Summoning the smile to his mind’s eye, he found he could still see it far too clearly. Lips were pressed firmly together, but stretched wide and upward. Eyelids were hooded over a gaze much gentler than their owner ever would have allowed of his own volition, with nearby skin scrunched along faintly defined laugh lines. It was cheerful – almost annoyingly upbeat in how it naturally broadcast relief –, but alongside all of that there was an undercurrent of… 

Tragedy?

Gintoki splashed water on his face.

Fuck. That was the thing about his instincts. They were the sharpest part of him. He had never been much of an analyzer or a planner; he would never be the kind of person that would buy a giant cork board and stab it with pins holding up pictures and string. Enough people around him did enough of that so that if he ever tried to break into the industry, they would immediately run him out of business.

Instead, he faced what he had to when he needed to without ever thinking too much about it. Most of the time that made things easy. Except when it came to shit like this.

He knew his subconscious wasn’t going to let him let this one go. Either he figured it out, or he was going to keep waking up at night yelling about smiling sons of bitches until Kagura’s fist knocked his brains right out of his skull.

He glanced at the clock. 12:27 AM. Sometimes Hijikata stayed out that late. Maybe Gintoki could go out, find him, and punch any hidden, mysterious smiles off his face. Maybe that would solve things.

* * *

“Gin-san.”

So it was true. Terada really had cursed him. And the curse was a whole lot bitchier than he had initially given it credit for. 

First, it threw Hijikata in his face in the weirdest way possible, and Gintoki was including that stint with Tosshi in his ranking system, so this was pretty damn weird. And then, as soon as Gintoki wanted to get in _Hijikata’s _face in return, to say his own piece, Terada made the guy disappear.

“Gin-san!”

It’s not like he didn’t put in the effort to find him or anything. It’s not like he just poked his head out of his house for a half a minute then gave up. No. He legit did the legwork here.

At night, any bar or evening eatery he had shared a counter or booth with Hijikata over the last few months found Gintoki shuffling slowly past, side-eyeing the clientele through the frosted windows, or ducking in for a quick scan before slipping back out again. There was a surprising amount of ground to cover, because these days Gintoki couldn’t randomly kick a pebble on the sidewalk without it hitting Hijikata hard enough in the nuts for the guy to call for his immediate arrest. Usually, he was always popping up and puffing smoke, like he was trying to snag the heavyweight title for the world’s pissiest human whack-a-mole.

“Hey Kagura-chan, what’s wrong with Gin-san? He’s just sitting at his desk with this hollowed out look on his face. He won’t respond to me. I’m waving a hand right in front of him and getting nothing back.”

“Oh, that? He’s been that way for a while. I think it has to do with clowns, but I can’t be sure. Anyway, to pass the time, I made a fun game out of it. See?”

Just to be safe, Gintoki would backtrack too, walking by the same bars a couple hours later, in case the guy decided to have his drink late enough to be a pain in the ass. 

This had been going on for days, and now when he did his checks at each late-night haunt the bartenders and regulars were starting to glance up, spot him, and say ‘He’s still not here, Gin-san!’ before Gintoki had done anything. He was getting tired of shouting, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, assholes!’ instead of a standard goodbye. 

“Why are you putting sukonbu wrappers in his hair!”

“It’s a game; I already told you. Plus, the trash can’s full.”

That morning, Gintoki had sunk low enough to actually try wandering by the Shinsengumi headquarters. Just outside the main gate, he would take a few steps then stop and bend down to tie some imaginary laces on his boots. He would walk a little farther, look at an imaginary watch on his wrist, and turn back the other way as if he had forgotten some important meeting in the opposite direction. He would come across some old lady carrying a bag of groceries and would insist on helping her carry it just as far as would keep him within eyesight of those gates then throw her back her groceries and wander back the other way again, looking intently at the ground as if searching for some lost item he had dropped.

He would accidentally run into that bastard Hijikata if it was the last thing he ever did.

“Is this your way of trying to get me to take out the trash? You know it’s your week to do it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just giving our Gin-chan a new, funky fresh look to lift his spirits.”

Unfortunately, after a good thirty minutes of this, some side character in uniform who was not Hijikata came out to inform him he had to stop stalking around the Shinsengumi HQ or else a pair of handcuffs would be getting themselves involved. Gintoki had replied that he was very offended by the poor level of service he was receiving and would like to speak to a manager – particularly one at the Vice-Commander level. Otherwise, he would be leaving a scathingly negative review on Whelp!.

Mr. Side Character, who obviously had not been one of the lackeys who had ever accompanied the main cast on a pivotal Shinsengumi-related story arc and so had not seen any of Gintoki’s excellent feats of protagonist glory, did not have the decency to care.

“You’re not going to bait me with this, Kagura-chan. Gin-san can defend himself if he really wants to. I’m going to watch some TV.”

At that point, Gintoki could have gotten himself arrested, which would have surely meant a face-to-face with Hijikata, but he had the feeling that would have come off as a little too desperate. 

Instead, he had slunk back to his place and settled in his chair with only a few hours to spare until his three-man team had to go carry ten couches two kilometers across town. Why didn’t the Shinsengumi do things like that for people? They were getting paid enough that they should have to move every couch everywhere. 

Maybe that was why Hijikata had disappeared. He was busy moving couches.

Or maybe Hijikata no longer existed. Maybe that was the curse. Maybe Terada had cursed the regular Shinsengumi team out of reality and replaced them with two-bit side characters like the stupid one Gintoki had met today. Maybe that guy was the new Soichiro.

There weren’t any other possibilities left at this point.

“-us an update on the hostage situation in Kanazawa.”

“Yes, absolutely. We have good news. All hostages have been released and the terrorists responsible have been taken into custody. My sources tell me this was in large part due to excellent work by the Shinsengumi. Part of their policing force traveled to Kanazawa to ensure the safe extraction of the Shogun’s second cousin twice removed alongside Princess Soyo’s tutor’s dog walkers. We really have a lot to be proud of. And, if you mainly have just been seeing two-bit side character Shinsengumi members around town as of late, now you know why. This has been Hanano Saki with Oedo TV News Hour.” 

“Thank you, Hanano. Now to Ketsuno Ana with the weather.”

Gintoki stood up. Slowly, methodically, he began picking sukonbu wrappers out of his hair and chucking them at the television.

* * *

“Danna. Long time, no see,” Soichiro said. “And, to correct your inner monologue, it’s Sougo.”

“Has it been that long?” Gintoki replied, lazily chewing through a plate of dango as he spared a glance for the officer slacking on his patrol. “I hadn’t noticed.”

He really, really had not noticed, so everyone better stop bringing it up.

Taking a seat next to him, the kid lifted a pair of fingers which got him a quick nod from the waitress. 

“A few members of our team had to leave town for a week. Glad to see this place can survive for a bit in our absence.”

“Survive? Nah, we’ve been thriving,” Gintoki asserted, completely unwilling to pull punches at this juncture. “Maybe it should make you rethink your whole purpose as an organization.”

“Don’t be that way. If I didn’t have my job, I wouldn’t be able to do things like this,” Soichiro said as he handed Gintoki one of the two plates the waitress had given him.

Having just finished his own plate, Gintoki was in a fine mood to take a light bribe in the form of seconds. He immediately began munching away. Whatever information Soichiro was about to dig for couldn’t be that bad, or Gintoki would be getting a conga line of jumbo parfaits – or maybe even a thick wad of cash – instead of a single plate of dango. And maybe Soichiro should up the stakes, because both of those options sounded great right now.

Before he could suggest anything of the sort, intimating that the miraculous Gin-san had hidden depths of secret knowledge worth all the sugar a government salary could buy, Soichiro nonchalantly asked, “Have you had a chance to chat with the Shinsengumi’s inimitable Vice-Commander lately?”

Gintoki didn’t almost drop his dango. 

Did this mean he had been right when he had guessed Hijikata’s actions had been due to losing a terrible bet with his terrible subordinate?

“Hm? That guy?” he said distantly between bites. “Not that I can remember. He’s not a very memorable person. He’s got to do more than just eat anpan and play badminton. Add some polish to his character traits, and then maybe I’ll be able to spot him in a crowd better.”

“No, that’s Yamazaki. I’m talking about Hijikata. You know, the one that’s a bastard,” Soichiro emphasized, giving nothing away with his perfectly blank expression. 

Squinting, grumbling, like he was having to look through a pair of glasses with a terribly wrong prescription to divine the truth of things, Gintoki said, “Sounds vaguely familiar. Like maybe I spoke to him once at a party that everyone came to, and since everyone saw us there speaking together now they think we always hang out, but in reality we just spoke at that party that one time and the conversation really wasn’t all that interesting.”

“What was it about?” 

“What was what about?”

“The conversation,” Soichiro pursued.

“If everyone was at the party, that means you were there too, which would mean you already know what the conversation was about. You would have heard it,” Gintoki shot back.

Before Soichiro could muster up a sufficient response, Shinpachi ran up to them looking largely disturbed and incredibly confused. The last time Gintoki had seen this kind of Shinpachi was when Gintoki had gotten that gift of a hyper-realistic chocolate replica of his wooden sword from his chocolatier client. Failing to mention those particulars to the kids, he had started eating the sword in front of them one morning. 

Kagura had taken his actions in fine form, not entirely absent of empathy as she gave a long look to her own umbrella and said, “I get it. We all have those kinds of days.”

Shinpachi had exclaimed, “What kind of days are you talking about, Kagura-chan?” while his expression had looked precisely like the one he was wearing at this very moment.

“Okita-san, Gin-san,” he began, “There’s something going on, and I’m not sure what to do about it. One of you might be better suited to handle this.”

“When in doubt, just take a bite. Sometimes, after a leap of faith, your mouth can tell you what your eyes can’t,” Gintoki advised.

“I really don’t think that applies to this situation,” Shinpachi snapped. “My sister is marrying Kondo-san, and Hijikata-san is at my sister’s work right now, where they’re holding an eating contest to determine who he’s going to marry!”

Shinpachi had just dropped a few too many bombshells on this dango stand. 

While Gintoki didn’t almost drop his own stick of dango in response, Soichiro dropped his. The sauce quickly got to work staining his pants.

Okay. One thing at a time.

“What kind of food are they eating?” Gintoki asked.

“How can that be your first question!” Shinpachi exclaimed then huffed a sigh. “Hijikata’s eating a bunch of food topped with mayonnaise and they’re figuring out which person can stand sitting next to him the longest as he does so.”

“Has a front-runner emerged?” Soichiro followed up, appearing utterly fascinated by the direction of the conversation as he absently rubbed a napkin on his thigh, making that stain really set in. “Do they seem like they would be controlling enough to force him to quit the Shinsengumi and become a shell of himself as a miserable house-husband?

By the looks of it, Patsuan’s announcement was news to this kid, which was making Gintoki reevaluate his losing-a-bet theory for Hijikata’s bat-shit crazy behavior. His prank show theory was still on the table though.

“I don’t know,” Shinpachi replied. “I left before anything really got started. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch as Hijikata-san matched up with some random woman when there is apparently someone out there he’s actually in love with!”

“Well, Hijikata’s blossoming, creepy, preteen feelings for a _certain someone_ are the reason our Commander mustered up the guts to barter with Shimura, but I’m not sure how a mayo competition came out of it,” Soichiro drawled, annoyingly sly. “Needless to say, it all has my complete support.”

There was a pause as Shinpachi’s glasses flashed. 

Eventually, he asked, “Are you saying it’s Hijikata-san’s fault that the gorilla is marrying my sister?”

At Soichiro’s mild nod, the kid dropped down onto the bench beside him.

“Knowing that changes things,” he said coldly. “I’m less inclined to give his problems any worry, since he is the cause of mine.”

“That’s the spirit,” Soichiro said, and handed Patsuan his last stick of dango.

The two of them clinked their sticks together and bit off a dango in unison like they were toasting wine glasses at a wedding.

Or at any other formal occasion, really. It didn’t have to be a wedding. That was just one example.

Anyway, this dango stand was getting too crowded and Gintoki had already finished both of his plates long enough ago that the leftover sauce was starting to crust along the leafy patterns on the ceramic. He stood up, planning to leave the two kids to their rare moment of bonding.

“Where are you going, Danna?” Soichiro immediately called out after him with a tone that would have sneered if it had been a person with a face. 

Why ask questions when he already knew the answer? Was he trying to embarrass him? What a weak attempt. Soichiro must spend far too much time interacting with tsundere superiors who would blow up over even the lightest tease or accusation.

When Gintoki had once witnessed Hijikata stumble over a curb and kick it roughly in vengeance, his mild comment of ‘Wow, I feel much safer now that I know our diligent policing force is even protecting us all from the dangers of steps,’ had spurred forward an hours long shouting match that had ended with them both crashing a police helicopter into an abandoned warehouse that actually held a secret cache of blackmail materials on important political figures in Edo. 

It was a long story.

In short though, the relevant point at hand here was that not everyone was as easy to goad into a blind, incoherent rage as Mr. V-Bangs. Some people went through life on a higher plane of existence. 

Even when the curses of annoying ghosts got idiots onto secret prank shows that existed just to unsettle him, Gintoki knew how to keep his cool. Not only that, he also knew how to gain the upper hand. After a small bit of thought, he had figured it out. 

On the night this all started, that fucking smile had come around when Hijikata had thought Gintoki had been about to say no. His refusal had been heralded as a victory. To destroy that fucking smile and any imaginary upper ground the bastard thought he had gained in whatever-this-was, all Gintoki had to do was the opposite of that.

It was almost too easy.

“Where am I going? To enter into that eating contest, of course,” Gintoki replied, loud and clear. 

Which made it Shinpachi’s turn to drop his stick of dango.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re looking for more wine pairings, this chapter goes best with a half-full bottle of Sauvignon Blanc that was thrown angrily into a pool of radioactive waste, as well as Chapters 3-5 of Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains.

*Two weeks later

In what Gintoki assumed must have been the old fart’s version of approaching a subject with delicacy, Gengai actually tinkered with his scooter’s smoking, sparking, and shuddering engine for a good thirty silent seconds before leaning back on his oil-stained stool, cracking a knuckle, and coughing into his fist, saying, “You know, I was sure you would end up with a blonde. I was so sure you would that I told all the guys. You just made me lose all credibility with them.”

To Gengai’s credit, this wasn’t the worst unsolicited piece of word-vomit someone had given him with regards to the Hijikata Situation in the past couple weeks, but it really was way fucking down there.

“What do I care?” Gintoki replied a tad more mildly than he might have otherwise if the old man hadn’t been screwing around in the bowels of his scooter at that very moment. “It’s your own fault for speculating about whether someone’s a blonde-man or a brunette-man instead of whether someone’s an ass-man or a boob-man like any normal person would.”

“Me and the guys already figured out that you weren’t either of those, and were instead a shoulder-guy through-and-through, so we needed something tougher to nail down.”

Was he a shoulder-guy? He had never really thought about it, and would probably keep on not doing so. More importantly, since Shinpachi wasn’t here, Gintoki supposed he was going to have to take on some of the straight-man responsibility this time around.

“What guys, gramps? Who the hell are you having these conversations with?”

“What else are you supposed to talk about at the Society of Edo Mechanics Earning Notoriety conferences other than what best lubes your customers’ engines?” Gengai asked like it was some sort of legitimate question.

Gintoki was debating whether or not it would be easier to abandon his scooter and just walk the rest of the way in the snow at this point. He had been promised a warm meal on arrival, and the faster he got to his destination, the warmer the meal was likelier to stay. Waiting for Gengai to actually get things done was looking like it might end up being the slower of the two options. When the geezer was in the mood to be chatty, he had no qualms holding Gintoki hostage until he had his fill.

“I guess I never thought you, of all people, would be one to cozy up with a government dog,” Gengai suddenly said in the same, even tone he had been using through the whole conversation, but the sharp rebuke was clear.

The old man leaned forward, so that his face was obscured from Gintoki’s view by the body of the scooter. He grabbed a wrench from his belt, and started tightening something or other. The scrape of metal on metal filled what would otherwise be a very silent garage.

Gintoki remembered when he had first met this old coot, in a time when the man had been feverishly obsessed with building robots that could hurt the government as much as the loss of his son had hurt him. Considering his past, considering what had been ripped from his hands and who had done the ripping, Gengai’s response wasn’t all that surprising, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

“If you’re expecting me to start dressing in uniform, marching around town licking boots, with my perm gelled and parted down the middle, you’re really going to be disappointed,” Gintoki said dully. “Nothing’s going to change, except that you can put all my bills on Mr. Vice-Commander’s tab now. We agreed on this before I came here, so you don’t even need to check in with him about it.”

“You can’t really expect it to be that simple,” Gengai said. “You’re not _that_ big of an idiot.”

But it really was that simple. The motivations behind him agreeing to keep Hijikata within groping distance two weeks back were far simpler than he could say aloud.

If Gintoki admitted that his real reason was all about not letting that bastard win because a peculiar ghost of a smile had unsettled and pissed him off in equal measure, it would probably sound petty. And then he would lose. He didn’t know all of the rules of play yet, but he was pretty sure acknowledging he was playing was breaking one of them.

Was he taking part in a Dating Fight Club? Maybe. Hijikata wouldn’t stop pretending to be in love with him for long enough to explain.

All he knew was that by adhering to the first rule of Dating Fight Club, he was dragging more people into this mess than he would have liked. And they were all a bunch of nosy assholes who didn’t know how to take a hint.

“Get off my back. I’m doing this, whether you like it or not,” Gintoki snapped.

Gengai stopped his tinkering, sitting up with a look of shock.

Lifting his goggles so that they sat directly atop his crusty eyebrows, he murmured, “Those were the exact same words my wife said to me the first time we tried pegging. That must mean you’re serious about this.”

“WHAT DISGUSTING LEAPS OF LOGIC ARE YOU MAKING, OLD MAN?”

“She was determined,” Gengai continued unfazed, eyes looking fondly back into a past Gintoki was infinitely grateful he didn’t have to see. “Even though I wasn’t convinced, I trusted her confidence and it ended up being a very good night.”

“I know I’ll regret asking, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“Perhaps I’ve just lived long enough to understand that even when you might have your suspicions about what they have strapped to their hips, sometimes you can still decide to trust a person. The world is complicated, and the people within it make complicated decisions. Not everything is black and white.”

Gintoki paused.

“Are you saying Hijikata’s a dick?”

Smiling wide enough for his gap-toothed grin to light up the garage, Gengai exclaimed, “Exactly!”

And there was no arguing with that.

As they both rose to their feet, Gengai wheeled his scooter to the curb and said, “I’ll go ahead and put this on the Shinsengumi Vice-Commander’s tab. Just this once.”

They both knew Hijikata would never come to this place, much less pay any tab. This seemed to be the old fart’s way of trying to make amends.

Gintoki climbed aboard his scooter and started the engine. It purred, sounding healthier than he could ever recall it being.

Feeling strangely sentimental, he turned to look at Gengai, warmly saying, “Thanks, gramps,” just as his mirror opened up to a nozzle that shot a gallon of soy sauce directly at his chest.

* * *

“Oh, good. I see you’ve already eaten,” Zura declared, referencing Gintoki’s well-sauced exterior as he slurped up an obnoxious mouthful of ramen. “That will certainly speed things along.”

Ignoring him, Gintoki stomped up to the counter and roughly pulled off his gloves, flexing his fingers, letting the rush of warm air quickly get to work restoring feeling to his limbs.

“You said a giant bowl of ramen would be waiting for me right on this counter when I got here,” he accused, tapping the wood. “Is it an invisible, ghost ramen?”

Ikumatsu simply raised her eyebrows with an expression that said it couldn’t be helped.

“Katsura-san claimed that if you were more than thirty minutes late to a free meal, you had most certainly died, and that you had promised back in the war that on the occasion of your death he was welcome to your things.”

Gintoki whirled around immediately, and darted across the shop, grabbing hold of the end of Zura’s chopsticks, pulling them away just as they were about to shovel another truckload of _Gintoki’s_ rightful meal into that stupid mouth of his.

“Hey, asshole,” he said. “Stop eating my food.”

Zura simply raised his eyebrows with an expression that said it couldn’t be helped. He continued to try to pull the chopsticks forward.

“You were taking too long to get here and I got hungry.”

Gintoki continued to try to pull the chopsticks backward as he said, “Who cares? Why were you even waiting for me in the first place? I’m not here to see you, Zura. Go away.”

Zura continued to try to pull the chopsticks forward as he said, “Not Zura, _Katsura_. And I asked Ikumatsu-dono to call in her favor from you for my sake. It was always the plan for us to meet here.”

The chopsticks broke in half. Gintoki stepped back with his two wooden stubs, throwing the pair roughly at Zura, who easily caught them in one hand. He poured a few droplets out of a pair of mysterious vials onto the broken ends of the chopsticks then pushed them back together. Brow furrowed, he held that position as the seconds marched on and he waited for whatever-it-was to dry.

That whole stupid process seemed to be distracting Zura enough that Gintoki could take his leave without trouble.

“Ikumatsu-san,” he said over his shoulder. “My IOUs are non-transferable. You don’t just get to give one of them to Zura –”

“_Katsura_,” Zura interjected, eyes still on his chopsticks.

“And then give him my meal on top of that,” Gintoki added, his hand on the door frame. “See you later.”

When Ikumatsu had called him that morning to call in her favor, he should have known something like this would happen. He hadn’t even remembered owing her anything, and had felt comfortable in telling her so, when she had informed him that Kagura had been the one to offer up his services a week earlier in exchange for the blood.

“What blood?” he had asked.

“She said you would be good for it,” had been Ikumatsu’s cryptic reply.

At the time, he had vaguely wondered if this was more radioactive fallout coming his way from Hijikata and Kagura’s infamous Mami-Daughter day. The week following Hijikata brazenly stealing his clothes and manipulating one of Gin-san’s innocent employees into sniffing out some dumb criminal or another, people kept coming around to give him shit about it.

Sarutobi had fashioned all the remaining scraps she could find of his poor, mutilated Wednesday yukata into a Frankenstein’s dress that she refused to take off, insisting that she could wear it longer and better. Whenever he ran into Tae, she would find a way to shoehorn into their conversation how very _taken_ Kagura-chan appeared to be with Hijikata-san after they had spent their day together, and that dating as a single parent came with unique _responsibilities_ that Gin-san should be sure to take _seriously_. Also, in his one recent encounter with Tsukuyo, she had looked at him with an uncomfortable level of awkward guilt and said that, in case he was wondering, her hunting license had just expired so she wouldn’t be doing any of that anymore, just so he knew – which maybe had nothing to do with Kagura and Hijikata, but it was strange enough that he felt like including it in the list anyway.

However, more than any of that, Gintoki had found himself truly unnerved by Kagura herself. The morning following her strange adventure with Hijikata, when she had returned from Tae’s place, she had sat down on top of Gintoki’s legs on the couch where he had laid sprawled out, unmoving since the events of the previous evening.

Kagura had looked him over, up and down, then patted his knee and smiled.

“I’ve decided,” she had declared with warmth, “Toshi and I are going to be good friends.”

In that moment, he had been the closest he had come since all of this had started to admitting everything. He had almost opened his mouth and told her that this was just another arm wrestling match between him and the Shinsengumi’s VC. That all this was just innocent ol’ ‘Toshi’ trying to be sneaky and shitty and get something out of him, and Gintoki refusing to let him get away with whatever-it-was, so she should just stick to generally ignoring the man’s existence and calling it a day.

He had been about to let her in on it all when his mind flashed back yet again to the evening prior: Hijikata spread out underneath him, on his couch, in his ragged Wednesday yukata, hands tangled in his hair, kissing him like the world would end if they stopped. It was an Oscar-worthy performance played by one of the shittiest actors Gintoki knew, which would have tripped him up if he wasn’t already horizontal. There was no time to think about contradictions or tug on loose threads, because he was too busy pushing, prying open a mouth that responded roughly, with dogged persistence, in a way that felt like Hijikata was desperately taking out his anger and viciously swearing loyalty all at once. Almost as if he was saying…

“_I hate that I know there will never be anyone else.”_

“What?” Kagura had asked, which was when Gintoki had realized he had actually said that last part.

Where had he heard that phrase – those words spoken aloud? Because he had heard them. He had. Undeniably. Somewhere, somewhen, some_wh__at the hell was this?_

There was something. He was wandering, circling around the banks of something important, he knew it. He was so close.

After a pause, he had scratched his thigh and grunted.

“Just let me sleep,” he had grumbled, rolling on his side so that Kagura slid off his legs and onto the couch cushion.

In a rare show of mercy, Kagura had listened and left him alone, but the consequences of what she must have done the day before kept coming back to bite him with vigor. A week later, when he had rested the phone against his shoulder and asked her what Ikumatsu was talking about with the blood, Kagura had paused in her vigorous petting of Sadaharu and said, “I told her you’d be good for it.”

Gintoki had responded both to Kagura and into the receiver with a, “I don’t care what anybody said I’d be good for.”

After a sigh, Ikumatsu had said, “Fine. I suppose I’ll find someone else to taste test my new type of ramen.”

Quickly, Gintoki had replied, “Now, let’s not be hasty.”

Perhaps he should have applied that advice to his own damn self and the check engine light that had been flashing SOS in Morse code to him from the dashboard of his scooter for the past month.

But regrets never did much of anything for anyone. They certainly wouldn’t clean his clothes.

Smelling distinctly of Octane 87 brand soy sauce, Gintoki calmly stepped out of the ramen shop and into the cold of winter.

Ikumatsu called after him, “Hey, you can’t take the ramen outside!”

Gintoki looked down at the steaming bowl he had swiped out from under Zura’s nose while the idiot was focused on putting his chopsticks back together. There were still a few bites left and Gintoki would enjoy them somewhere else, far away from this.

“You really could stand to learn better manners,” Zura said suddenly, unfortunately next to him. “Now Ikumatsu-dono will be much less likely to share her favors.”

Gintoki brought the ramen up to his mouth and downed the lot of it before Zura could get his repaired chopsticks anywhere in range. He then gave Zura the empty bowl.

“Thanks for the food,” he burped, and made his way over to his scooter.

“Wait,” Zura demanded, catching his arm. “Before you leave, there’s something here that you need to see. It's why I asked her to call you here in the first place.”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s important.”

“I don’t care.”

“The Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi is using you, Gintoki.”

Ah, so Zura knew about the Hijikata Situation too. In the two weeks since Gintoki had won that eating contest at Snack Smile and received a chain-smoking, compulsively lying mayo-nerd as his prize, all of Edo seemed to have heard the news. Didn’t this town of gossips have anything better to talk about?

“I would sure hope so,” Gintoki replied in the bluntest of terms, which were the only kind Zura truly understood. “I plan to use him at least two nights a week, and every national holiday.”

Entirely unfazed, Zura folded his arms and asked, “So you aren’t at all curious about why he has goaded you into this?”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“What do you mean, ‘what do you mean by that?’” Zura exclaimed, looking strangely offended. “Can you possibly think I do not know you’re dating the man simply because you think it will irritate him?”

If Gintoki had been holding a stick of dango, he might have just dropped it, but he wasn’t holding one, so he didn’t.

He had kept his secret perfectly, but here was this stupid man telling him how even a stupid man could obviously see the truth. Just where had he slipped up?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gintoki blustered.

“Come now,” Zura said with the affect of a grumpy teacher talking down to his student during remedial lessons over what would otherwise have been both of their summer vacations. “I’ve grown and fought alongside you. I’ve had time to really learn about you. As a friendly challenge, Sakamoto and I have made a few bets over the years, testing the limits of our knowledge of your behavior. One of those bets was predicting the circumstances surrounding how you would eventually end up settling down with someone.”

“Both of you have way too much time on your hands, and this is coming from the self-proclaimed neighborhood freeloader!” Gintoki exclaimed.

Undeterred, Zura continued, “Sakamoto thought you would get stupidly drunk enough to get a woman pregnant and later hastily take responsibility, while I said you would take your friendly rivalry with a man to a level that eclipsed reason, turning your dick measuring contest into a literal dick measuring contest.”

“Those scenarios are way too depressing and specific! And they paint me to be a real shitty person! Is that actually what you think of me?”

“Gintoki,” Zura said, gaze intense, “look me in the eyes and tell me I’m wrong. Look me right in the face and tell me I shouldn’t be calling Sakamoto and Takasugi to get my 50 yen.”

So his future was only worth 50 yen to those jerks!

If they were going to be shitty with their little bets, Gintoki could be shitty when it came to telling the truth.

“You shouldn’t be calling Sakamoto and Taka – wait, Takasugi?”

“Yes, even Takasugi got in on this one. He said that he would be sure to kill you before you managed to humiliate yourself either way,” Zura said with a warm smile. “He did always have a soft spot for you.”

“It sounds less like he had a soft spot for me and more like he was looking for my soft spots, so he could stab them!” Gintoki exclaimed. “When did you even find the time to shoot the breeze with that asshole anyway?”

“Outside of the storyline, on neutral ground, we meet up at the annual Samurai Expatriate Men who are Enthusiastic Nuisances conference. I’ve told Kenshin, the committee chairman, to send you an invitation each time, but I’ve never seen you there. You really should come this year.”

Why were there so many suspiciously named conferences that just seemed to be poorly veiled excuses to gossip about poor Gin-san!

“Stop putting me on mailing lists I didn’t sign up for,” he snapped. “Next time I need to give a restaurant my address to get a free dessert, I am giving them the Joui headquarters!”

Not giving his threats even the slightest consideration, Zura simply beckoned for him to follow, heading toward the entrance to the alleyway near Ikumatsu’s shop. He ducked under the rolls of police tape and the large ‘No Civilian Entry!’ signs blocking off the area.

Continuing to stay right where he was, Gintoki looked at his scooter and then looked back at the police tape. He looked at his scooter again. It didn’t take much deliberating for him to sit on his scooter and fumble around for his keys... Where had he put those damn things?

A slight jingling sound came from the alleyway. Zura was holding something up, shaking it.

“Looking for something?” the asshole asked.

“Goddammit, Zura!”

“Not goddammit, Zura; it’s goddammit, _Katsura_!”

* * *

Boots sinking into the piles of mud on the floor, squelching with each step he took, Gintoki looked around the underground room filled with rocks, scraps of metal, chunks of concrete, broken bulbs... The clear, chaotic aftermath of an underground cave-in. What was now a twenty by twenty foot cell dug out of the dirt beneath the street near Hokuto Shinken must have once been far larger. The place stunk of mold and old bones. Death on all sides. For half a blink, Gintoki was transported back through the years to a time when that was all he had. His stomach growled reflexively.

“You’re treating me to another bowl of the ramen you stole after this,” he declared, giving Zura his absolute worst stink eye.

Once again ignoring him, Zura asked, “Do you remember Sakamoto’s work organizing supply runs near the end of the war?”

“I make it a point to never remember what that guy does,” Gintoki commented, flicking some ear wax onto the wall next to him. It wasn’t like a little more of a mess was going to tip the scales and slide this place into the category of garbage dump. That had already happened long before he got here. Awards had already been given out. No take backs.

“He got involved working with resistance forces in this region, giving them food and weapons to transport through a network of tunnels that brought them to the fronts of different skirmishes, so that they could nurse and feed their weak and wounded.”

That sounded vaguely familiar. It was familiar enough for Gintoki to recall that it hadn’t ended well.

“Tragically, the Bakufu partnered with the Amanto to flood those tunnels and killed hundreds,” Zura continued, eyes traveling calmly, but sharply over the wreckage. “The news had Sakamoto distracted. Three days later, he came back from the battlefield with his right arm in tatters. Surely for him and for others, those tunnels have become a large focal point of underground anger – a symbol of how truly cruel and monstrous the corrupt, unjust system we fight against has become.”

Gintoki really didn’t see the point in digging up the past. Those that were gone would stay gone, no matter how much blood was shed on the matter. He stood silently next to Zura, idly scratching his stomach as he waited for an opportune moment to snatch back his keys.

“We – the Joui – were keeping an eye on a rebel group that recently set up its base in those tunnels. While rebels ourselves, we do our part to neutralize harmful extremists, and this group was radicalizing to the point where I was concerned they would do something truly terrible,” Zura admitted. “Then, last week, another massive flood occurred in those tunnels, and, at the same time, Leader and the Shinsengumi’s Vice-Commander came crashing out of one of the exits. According to sources close to Ikumatsu-dono, this one here.”

Zura motioned vaguely at the room around them, causing the keys to jangle. Gintoki made a quick grab for them, but stupid Zura jerked his hand just out of reach.

“Since then, the Shinsengumi have been crawling all over this site and others, pumping out water and excavating. They have carted away the bones of countless dead,” Zura said, moving to fold his arms within the sleeves of his yukata.

Right before Zura’s fingers disappeared, Gintoki successfully plucked his keys off of them. He immediately headed back toward the ladder that would take him topside.

“I needed to make sure you knew that Hijikata-dono is using you and your team as pawns in the Shinsengumi’s battle against a dangerous group of individuals,” Zura called after him. “That is why he has so cleverly manipulated you into a whirlwind romance.”

Pausing with his boot on the first rung, Gintoki looked back at Zura. The man returned his dull glance with an urgent frown.

It was just like Zura to do top-tier reconnaissance, successfully gathering every piece of important information, and still get the story all wrong.

“Actually, no,” Gintoki said. “The guy’s definitely up to something with all this love stuff, but it’s not that. Any cop stuff he got done through this is just a bonus prize for that grifter.”

“How can you be so certain?” Zura asked, looking legitimately surprised for the first time that day.

There was a lot Gintoki could say in response.

He could mention how, despite his best efforts, he had come to know Hijikata pretty damn well. Over the years, he had learned the man’s habits and idiosyncrasies on and off the court – how he worked and how he played.

It had gotten to the point where, without even really thinking about it, Gintoki could tell by Hijikata’s tone of voice whether he was on duty, uniform or not. He could take a glance at his posture to see how much sleep he had been getting. The number of insults Gintoki could swing before receiving a punch told him how long it had been since the idiot’s last cigarette.

That was why, in response to Zura’s question, Gintoki could have said that when the Shinsengumi’s Vice-Commander had confessed his stupid feelings, he had done so off-duty, on a full night’s sleep, and well-smoked. He hadn’t done so to catch a criminal; he had done it for another reason entirely. And whatever it was, it was undeniably personal.

On the other hand, Gintoki could have mentioned none of that and instead described the fucking smile. He could have tried to explain to Zura the expression Hijikata had worn on his face in that bar and why it mattered. Gintoki’s words would have been messy, mostly nonsense, but maybe speaking about the nonsense to an old war buddy could have helped him remember where he had buried the bones that held the context for all this. Whatever the context, it was absolutely personal.

He could have said any number of those things, assuring Zura that his worries were over nothing, but the dumbass had just stolen Gintoki’s ramen, so, instead of any of that, Gintoki went with: “Have you and Ikumatsu done the dirty yet?”

If Zura had been holding a stick of dango, he most definitely would have dropped it.

“No, we’re not –”

“What are you waiting for? You’re not going to let her peg you?”

“What, I –” Zura attempted, his eyes wider than Gintoki had ever see them.

“Then you wouldn’t get it,” he declared, and climbed up the ladder.

Back on the surface, he leaned over the hole and cupped his hands, yelling, “If you can’t muster up the courage to get pegged by your lady, there are parts of human nature you’ll never understand!”

That should fuck Zura up for a nice, long while. At least a half hour.

Gintoki was feeling real good about all of that until he turned around to find five pairs of Shinsengumi eyes, Hijikata’s included, all trained right on him.

Slowly, he raised his hand and jingled his keys.

“I lost these,” Gintoki said, “but I should have just left them down in that hole, because then I would have a good excuse to ask my darling chain-smoker for a lovey-dovey car ride home.”

He made his best kissy face at the wall of uniformed officers which seemed to do much more damage than fists ever could. A good half of them looked plain terrified, while the other half were gazing desperately in their VC’s direction trying to figure out what the fuck they were supposed to do about any of this. Hijikata himself looked admirably calm, if you excluded the vicious fire leaking out of his hyper-dilated eyes.

Gintoki had gained an amazing kind of power when he entered the Dating Fight Club. Now cops would think twice before messing with him. They had all taken to bowing their heads when they passed him on the street and treating him to cans of strawberry milk. It was pretty much exactly like being a mob boss’ wife. Plus, acting the part only seemed to irritate the hell out of Hijikata, so there really was no losing to be had here.

“Depending on how things go, you still could get a car ride, Yorozuya,” the very same Hijikata said in a tone that was as sweet as sandpaper. “So who were you just talking to over there? I only ask because I get jealous and suspicious easily. I am sure hearing the truth from your lips will wipe away all my worries, and also give me context for why you are trespassing in a highly restricted area like a common _criminal_.”

“As much as I’d love to play cops and robbers with you, sexy bedroom scenarios have to be at least a little realistic for me to get in the mood. The problem is, I’m no robber and you’re hardly a cop. You’re more of a robber yourself, stealing everyone’s tax dollars, but I’d let you get away with murder, really, so I forgive you completely. You don’t even need to apologize. I’ll just be on my way, thinking of you at every moment,” Gintoki said, attempting to amble past the officers when the Vice-Commander grabbed his shoulder in a vice-grip.

Dammit.

“No, don’t go...” Hijikata said and, after what appeared to be a significant internal struggle, managed, “darling. Stay with me a bit longer. Tell me about your day. Particularly the part you spent here. In this particular place. Illegally.”

As he spoke, Hijikata made a flicking motion with his hand, which spurred his grunts to action. They surrounded the hole, preparing to descend right as Zura poked his head out.

“Perhaps you are right, Gintoki,” Zura said, calm as ever even with four swords on his neck. “Maybe it is because I have not been pegged by a lover, so I cannot understand. Or maybe it is you who underestimates the sharpness of the government’s teeth. Either way, one of us will end up being wrong. Let’s put 50 yen on our chosen mares and see who wins.”

With that, Zura threw his chopsticks high up into the air.

“I will admit this will be one of the only bets I’ve made that I would genuinely prefer to lose,” he added.

The chopsticks clattered to the ground and instantly exploded.

* * *

Gintoki picked at the remaining wisps of the sleeve of his Friday yukata, forlornly observing as it crumbled to ash under the slightest brush of his fingers. Leaning back on the bench a block away from Hokuto Shinken, he let out a long, irritated sigh, forming a white cloud of his breath in the night’s sharp chill.

The Shinsengumi lackeys had left him alone in the face of bigger, more explosive fish. All of them, that is, except for one.

“For the last time, I had no idea he was going to do that,” Gintoki said. “The idiot stole my ramen _and_ my keys, and then made a big enough explosion that my perm got all frizzy. I’m the real victim here, so you should be comforting me, not interrogating.”

Sitting next to him, Hijikata coughed up smoke the natural way, no cigarettes required. Soot covered him from top to bottom, but every hair on his head remained perfectly settled in its straight, v-banged formation – probably just to piss Gintoki off.

“How did he make chopsticks explode?” Hijikata asked.

“How would I know? I’m more concerned that you don’t. Are you losing the arms race against the Joui? How scary,” Gintoki said in monotone.

“We’re ten thousand years ahead of them,” Hijikata said like a knee-jerk reflex. “More importantly, now you’re going to tell me why you went down into that hole with Katsura.”

“Only if you tell me why you went down there with Kagura on your Mami-Daughter day. Why did you need her for a caving expedition? Just read Ted’s online caving journal, and that should be enough to prepare you for anything you encounter underground without bringing innocent civilians into the mix.”

Gintoki hadn’t actually been planning on bringing that up. Frankly, unlike Katsura, he didn’t really care why the two of them had gone underground to catch some radical rebel. Kagura seemed happy by the end of it all, and the rest of the details didn’t matter. However, Gintoki wasn’t about to take shit without throwing some back. Hijikata forced his hand, really.

Without missing a beat, Hijikata gave a pointed look and replied, “Why don’t you ask her?”

What was that supposed to mean?

Had the Shinsengumi installed hidden cameras at his place? Had they all watched that terrible moment the Yorozuya had shared over breakfast four days ago, when Gintoki been about to ask about her day with Hijikata, but he’d just ended up saying a confusing combination of sentence fragments:

“_So, Kagura, I’m sure you want to talk about how your day with Hi… high temperatures went. That hot day you had.”_

_Kagura looked at him as she chewed her mouthful of egg and rice, while Shinpachi said, “Gin-san, it’s the middle of winter.”_

He really really didn’t care where they’d gone or what they’d done. He had just thought to ask to make conversation, that was all, and then he remembered he didn’t want to have conversation so early in the morning so he’d changed his mind. That was all.

But he was in the mood to make conversation tonight.

“Why don’t you just tell me?” Gintoki demanded of Hijikata. “Is it secret cop stuff?”

A pause. A swallow.

“Yeah, of course. What else would it be? Shut up about it.”

Wow, that guy was a terrible liar. Gintoki found himself grinning like he’d just won himself 50 yen, which is to say the side of his mouth quirked up a bit for half a moment.

While cop stuff may be in the mix, as it always was with a guy like Hijikata, there was more to it. That was the point. That was why Gintoki hadn’t just up and walked away from all of this just yet.

“Not that you would know, but Zura’s a mother hen,” he suddenly said, which had Hijikata jerking back toward him, seeming surprised. “He worries about what people are doing in bad tunnels. He worries about what people are doing with bad men. He worries a lot.”

Hijikata absorbed his words, staying silent. Gintoki wondered if he was going to be arrested for admitting he knew anything about a wanted man. He wouldn’t put it past his Dating Fight Club partner to do that.

“Not that you ever should be, but if you happen to be in the same room with any worry warts, you can tell them that the Shinsengumi was able to get permission to do some digging,” Hijikata finally said. “We’re going to map out some tunnels that were never officially on the record, and make sure that bad things that may have happened before won’t happen again.”

All of sudden, when the topic wasn’t about Kagura, Hijikata seemed more than ready to talk about what was going down beneath their feet.

“_I’ve decided,” Kagura declared, “Toshi and I are going to be good friends.”_

Gintoki felt like he was starting to understand something.

“So what are you guys doing with the bones?” he asked.

Hijikata’s eyebrows raised in way that looked more resigned than surprised that he knew about this too.

“I thought I could give them back,” he replied, looking out into the distance. “Our lab techs will learn what they need to learn, and after that we might track down some families.”

Following Hijikata’s gaze, Gintoki saw the shadows of empty branches of hibernating Sakura trees, and, farther along the path, the dim sheen of dark ice thinly sealed over an imperfectly frozen river, water still clearly in motion beneath.

Gintoki wondered if Hijikata realized that for one sentence, he had switched from using ‘we’ to using ‘I’. Giving the bones back hadn’t been the Shinsengumi’s decision or one made on behalf of the team. It had all come down to one man.

“Those families, they’re all gonna hate you,” Gintoki commented. “You’re poking at old wounds and there won’t be anyone for them to blame for any of it but you uniformed thugs.”

“I’m not here to win any popularity contests,” Hijikata responded, wry.

“So why are you here then?”

“It’s my job.”

It wasn’t the answer to the question Gintoki was really asking – not that he had been expecting one. Clearly Hijikata wasn’t about to give up _that_ answer without a fight, but, unfortunately for him, Gin-san was more than ready to throw down. One of his favorite series – Punter v Punter – was on hiatus again, so he had more free time than usual.

And the more time he spent in this Dating Fight Club, the more he could feel his determination hardening. There was something about all of this that he couldn’t let go. He had to uncover where these bones were buried, put them up for adoption, and find them a nice cemetery in the suburbs with a big lawn where they could rest peacefully, so they would stop haunting the shit out of him.

Not that he believed in the things that supposedly haunted people or anything.

“Why are _you_ here, Yorozuya?” Hijikata turned the question right back on him.

Gintoki gave Hijikata a once-over, taking in his burnt, sizzling uniform, which formed a stark contrast to the pristine hilt of the sword that lay sheathed on his belt. Gintoki thought of what that sword had done and would do. He thought of the hand that held the sword and the bones those fingers were intent on bringing home.

Gintoki wrapped his arm roughly around a shoulder that stiffened, but did not pull away. Finding Hijikata’s body a welcome warmth in the cold, he held him tight.

“A wise old man once told me there can come a time in your life when you’ve just gotta trust a dick,” he said.

Instead of responding to that, Hijikata simply asked, “Why the hell do you stink of soy sauce?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three weeks later, Gintoki returned to Hokuto Shinken and ordered some ramen. When Ikumatsu slammed down the bowl in front of him, there was a large, strap-on dildo floating in it.
> 
> “I know this is your fault,” she accused. “You put him up to this, didn’t you!”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sub. Sublime. Subliminal. **Sublimation.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter goes best with a bucket of half-smashed grapes that someone abandoned in their garage when they realized that making wine from scratch was actually really difficult and time-consuming, and subsequently decided to get another hobby after spending just about an hour on the wine thing. Oh, and also chapters 6 and 7 of Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains.

“Good morning, everyone,” Ketsuno Ana exclaimed brightly.

“Grd mrnig,” Kagura shouted through her toothbrush.

Gintoki grunted.

“I hope you all have nice hats to wear today,” Ketsuno Ana continued, tipping her own OEDO TV cap in their direction. “Otherwise, your head will get a bit warm from all this uninterrupted sun we’ll be having.”

She gestured off-camera, which had the shot swiveling to view buildings and cars and sweaty people glistening in the sunlight, a vast, cloudless sky above them.

“Gin-chan, where’s my sun hat?” Kagura asked, spitting toothpaste on him.

“How should I know?” he spoke directly into the couch cushion, unwilling to even lift his head. “Check your closet.”

“I already checked. It’s not there,” Kagura replied, completely fluent in cushion.

“Maybe Shinpachi took it,” he offered.

“I didn’t take it!” a voice exclaimed from the kitchen, loud enough to be heard over the generic banging of pans and hissing of burners and preparing of breakfast. “Have you checked the bureau by the desk?”

Kagura took that as an opportunity to throw all of Gintoki’s stored belongings all over the room, as she dug through his drawers for her hat. A pair of his own boxers landed on his head, which provided him with the smelly realization that he really should wash them soon. Maybe next week.

“… and that’s why the fifth dermatologist does not recommend that level of SPF even on the sunniest summer day,” Ketsuno Ana was saying. “You have to consider all the factors when keeping your face protected. To learn more, tune in next Friday to watch our exclusive coverage of the second out of the three official Dermatologist Debates, where all five dermatologists will get up on stage once again to explain their reasoning in short, soundbite form. You will be able to vote for your favorite dermatologist by texting us at XX-XXX. The dermatologist with the most votes by the end of the third debate will be crowned the Ultimate Dermatologist. Only the Ultimate Dermatologist can hand out prescriptions to lotion that makes your skin so protected that you will literally be invisible to the Sun, and all the rest of us as well.”

“Found it,” Kagura crowed, holding her straw hat over her head in one hand, while fanning herself proudly with the other. “I’m finally ready for summer.”

“And now that we’ve covered the weather above the knees, it’s time to get to the weather around them,” Ketsuno Ana said, and the camera tilted down to show the swath of dark angry storm clouds, completely covering the region of space roughly half a meter off the ground as far as the eye could see. “For everyone’s feet, skies will once again be stormy. Expect the rain to continue on for the rest of the week.”

* * *

A lot of people, Gintoki included, had initially thought it was some kind of elaborate April Fool’s Day prank. When it started storming at the shins on April first, what other conclusion was anyone supposed to come to?

Unfortunately for everyone across the entire planet, while it began on April first, the rain did not end at the end of that day or the next. Or even the next. According to reports, storming clouds forty centimeters above the ground had covered all of Earth for a good two and a half months now.

It was a mild annoyance of the worst kind. Everywhere you walked was muddy, even indoors. There was no way to prevent clouds of that height from getting inside, so first floors had become leaky, rotting swimming pools and second stories were suddenly prime real estate – rare oases of dry land.

The clouds were so thick it was impossible to keep track of where you feet were going or what they might run into, and falling down on the street now always meant getting a cold, dirty, full-body shower. Even if you were lucky enough to remain upright throughout the day, mini lightning strikes across your feet and ankles like someone was getting over-zealous with a bug zapper were simply unavoidable – unless, of course, you were Gintoki.

“I mean,” Gintoki began through a mouthful of watery curry, “I know that some people really enjoy starting to dress alike when they’re a couple, but I want you to know that I’m not one of those people. I am so far away from being one of them that I am the person who points and laughs when I see them. You’ll never hear me asking you to do something pathetic like wear matching shirts. We both have our own identities. Or, in other words, have some self-respect and stop copying me.”

“I’m not copying you,” Hijikata insisted for the 57th time, puffing smoke angrily in Gintoki’s direction. “These boots are standard issue for the Shinsengumi uniform right now due to the weather. If you don’t want us to be wearing the same boots, you can go ahead and take yours off.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Gintoki shot back, kicking one of his boots up above the clouds, splattering water on Hijikata and Hijikata’s already-watery chicken sandwich. “That way, you could claim it as your original look, as a true rip-off artist always does. Don’t you dare even think that I would ever give you the satisfaction, Ripikata-kun.”

“Who are you calling Ripikata?” Hijikata exclaimed, childishly kicking water up at Gintoki like the bully he was.

Gintoki’s curry got even wetter. He sunk his chopsticks into the lake, patiently fishing for a good chunk of chicken. When he caught one, he brandished it at the man across the booth from him like an accusation. Water droplets diluted with sauce sprinkled across the table.

“If your Shinsengumi crew would just figure out who was doing this and handcuff their evil weather machine to the ‘off’ position, you wouldn’t even have an excuse to rip off my boots, my lazyass Ripikata-kun,” he said.

“This rain has nothing to do with the Shinsengumi. It’s not our problem,” Hijikata insisted for the 73rd time. “Out of everything going on in this city right now, this is easily the least important.”

Hijikata probably wished it was raining just a bit higher, so all that Shogun-themed graffiti he kept grumbling about would get washed away before he could discover it and get mad and make brusque, snappy calls to Jimmy on his phone.

“It’s important to _me_,” Gintoki asserted and vaguely gestured toward his perm. “Even above the clouds, the humidity is making me fuzzy.”

“You’re fine. You just look like one of those… angora rabbits,” Hijikata said, far too on the nose for Gintoki’s liking, which had Gintoki’s twitching. “Get yourself sheared or something. Problem solved.”

“As someone with stupidly straight hair, I don’t expect you to understand, but as the person I make kissy faces at when I pass you by on the street, I do expect you to care.”

Hijikata took a sip of his coffee, which was more water than dirt at this point, and did what he always did when Gintoki challenged his fake-sincerity. He swallowed whatever gut reaction he wanted to shout out, paused, ground his teeth, and said some bullshit.

“Of course I care. I care about your hair more than I care about any other hair anywhere. Which is why I think you should just shave it all off so it doesn’t bother you anymore, which is my top priority,” Hijikata said, bearing his teeth into more of a snarl than a smile.

Before the days when it was normal for Gintoki and Hijikata to get lunch together at some diner that was generally set somewhere halfway between the Yorozuya HQ and the Shinsengumi barracks, Gintoki easily would have used this as an opportunity to turn Hijikata’s dark clouds into a full on thunderstorm, but nowadays… well, there was already enough water on the floor as it was. That was all.

While this weather had Gintoki’s hair fluffing up above his head like it was cosplaying a lighter version of the storm clouds below him, Hijikata’s had hair sunk down. His bangs were sticking to his forehead and the longer pieces would slide into his now-perpetually-bloodshot eyes if he moved the wrong way. When they did, Gintoki would count the seconds until Hijikata noticed or cared enough to put down his cigarette or his cell phone or his sword or his pen and wipe them away.

“What I’m saying,” Hijikata was saying, “is that the rain is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I’ll put it this way: If someone, for some stupid reason, decided to write a story about this particular year of my life, the rain wouldn’t even warrant a footnote. Anyone who read that hypothetical story wouldn’t even know that the floor was raining during this time.”

“Oh yeah? Well, it seems we place importance on very different things,” Gintoki challenged, feeling irrationally pissed-off. “If anyone wrote a story about this year of _my_ life, it would be a lot shorter than yours, for one, because I would never let it drag on with overly-emotional and pointless side plots. Also, the shorter, streamlined, main plot of my _better_ story would absolutely primarily focus on the fact that the goddamned floor is raining right now!”

Gintoki glared bitterly at Hijikata as the roar of thunder echoed out from beneath their knees. After a tense moment, Hijikata moved to stand. He clenched the side of the table for a second too long, knuckles white, before straightening up.

“I’m gonna go pay the bill and get back to work.”

Gintoki rose, grabbed him by the ascot, and tugged him in for a kiss that was somehow wetter than the soaked, slimy land beneath the table. For a moment, it was as if they had pulled the clouds up to their heads and then immediately flung the whole ecosystem back down to the floor upon separation.

“Good luck,” he said, the taste of coffee suddenly stark and bitter on his tongue.

* * *

“So, in summary, we’re going to find out who is making it rain exclusively below the belt and make them stop it,” Gintoki announced from his chair, slamming a fist on his desk for emphasis.

Kagura and Shinpachi looked at each other from where they sat on the Yorozuya couches.

“When he said he had a big announcement, I thought it was going to be him finally admitting that he was the one that stole Sadaharu’s dog food the other day,” Kagura said.

Shinpachi nodded.

“Yeah, I didn’t actually think he’d admit to it though. I thought he was going to try and blame it on someone else. Hasegawa-san is usually his go-to for that kind of thing, so that was my guess.”

Kagura’s mouth formed an ‘O’ of comprehension.

“That makes sense! I bet he’s still going to do that. He probably just wants to warm us up with a side quest first before hitting us with the ‘Madao-Stealing-the-Dog-Food’ story.”

The two kids nodded at each other.

“Stop making up crap,” Gintoki demanded, refusing to acknowledge that those sucker punches directly to his ego had actually landed. “What I do in my own house with food I’ve bought is my own business.”

“Food you’ve bought with the salary you never pay me,” Kagura corrected, “so technically that’s my dog food.”

“And mine,” Shinpachi added, piling onto the general sentiment of mutiny that had so suddenly invaded the room.

“What? Are you a group of shareholders asking for the quarterly report on Sadaharu’s Dog Food Mutual Fund? If you mindlessly chase after profits from your investments, you’re only going to force the company to perform unethical practices in an attempt to reach your ridiculously unfair expectations.”

The kids stared at him dully.

“Fine,” he exclaimed. “I used the food to repel a home invader, and I even gave Sadaharu the rest of my chips to make up for it after.”

It was true. Zura had knocked on his door at two in the morning last week with a disturbingly serious expression on his face, and in a fit of angry, drunken inspiration Gintoki had started throwing dog food at him, yelling “Demons out! Luck in!”

He did this until Zura had cried, “Setsubun was months ago!”

“Ah, you’re right,” Gintoki had acknowledged. “My mistake.”

This is when he had slammed the door in the asshole’s face – and given Sadaharu some of the more crumbled pieces of chips at the bottom of the bag after the stupid mutt wouldn’t stop staring at him. The two of them had watched some more late night variety TV while Zura continued to lurk outside like gum that just wouldn’t come off the sole of your shoe no matter how much you scuffed it against the sidewalk.

“Well, as long as you gave him something in return,” Kagura said, finally appearing satisfied.

“I always give him everything,” Gintoki proclaimed. “And in return, all he gives me is shit.”

Sadaharu threw him a dirty look and Gintoki just _knew_ he was using his whole body to cook up an extra, super rancid piece of crap for Gintoki to pick up later.

“So why are we supposed to be getting rid of the rain again?” Shinpachi asked, finally moving the conversation forward. “Is this a job?”

“It’s our job to be good citizens and do good deeds,” Gintoki corrected.

“Are you trying to hide the reward from us so you can just keep it for yourself?” Kagura asked.

Why did she have such a low opinion of him! While that did sound like something he might do, Kagura really didn’t need to call him out on it.

“The reward will be less foot fungus per square kilometer, which is really a reward for everyone if you think about it.”

Shinpachi gave him a long look, sighing through his nose.

“Is this about your stupid thing with Hijikata-san?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gintoki replied. “I don’t have any stupid things with that guy. The only things I have with him are incredible and sexy.”

Shinpachi’s long look got darker. While everyone else in Gintoki’s life had gotten on-board with his claim of romance with Mr. Mayocop within the first week or two, Patsuan remained the one hold-out. Months into the whole deal, Shinpachi would find the two of them clenching their hands together, and come up to Gintoki later asking, “Really, Gin-san, you can tell me. Is someone blackmailing you? Or are you just doing this to be stubborn for some reason?”

Why did he have such a low opinion of him! While that did sound like something he might do, and actually was doing, Shinpachi really didn’t need to call him out on it.

“Whenever you start acting strange in ways that make less sense that usual, it always seems to go back to Hijikata-san these days,” Shinpachi asserted, refusing to let the issue drop.

“Well, I wouldn’t expect a cherry boy to understand the depths people go to for some handmade chocolate on Valentine’s Day,” Gintoki snorted.

“How dare you!” Shinpachi’s glasses flashed like the lightning happening only one floor below them, if Catherine’s howls were anything to go by. “I know what it means to care a lot more than some other people in this room. What you’re doing with Hijikata-san is far away enough from ‘care’ that it probably doesn’t even know what that word means! Why are you doing this to him? Why are you doing this to yourself?”

Here Gintoki found himself uncomfortably reminded of how well Shinpachi knew him. The kid was half a good thought away from figuring out the whole plot, which had Gintoki impressed and irritated in equal measure. If Shinpachi solved the mystery, he definitely would spill the beans and then Gintoki would lose and then Hjikata would leer and say, “See? I love you, but you don’t love me,” and then he would dance away and Gintoki would just be standing there like a loser with a puffed up perm and nothing to show for it.

No, he wasn’t about to let that happen, which unfortunately meant he had to say what he was about to say next.

“Again, your cherry is showing.”

And it really was. Shinpachi’s face was bright red.

“Fine,” he said. “Well, this cherry boy curses you. I curse you with a cherry boy curse that you will never escape until the end of your days!”

Thunder rumbled ominously from the first floor as Shinpachi stood and stomped out of the room.

“You’ve gone and done it now,” Kagura commented. “I’ve heard cherry boy curses are pretty serious.”

Now that she mentioned it, Gintoki’s scalp was feeling a little tingly… no, no, it was nothing. It was nothing!

“So I’m cursed to have an extra cherry on top of my sundaes. Big deal,” he replied, determinedly ignoring the way his voice had cracked when he said cherry.

What else could a cherry boy curse be? It’s not like it could turn him into a cherry boy for life or something. That wouldn’t even make biological sense. He was fine. Super fine. Definitely.

“Back to the rain,” he insisted. “We’re solving it.”

Kagura shrugged.

“Okay, I guess,” she said. “As long as you get Mami 4 to come to my bowling team’s regional competition.”

It wasn’t a difficult bribe as bribes went. When they were together these days, Hijikata followed where he led nearly without question. Gintoki could bring the guy to the gates of hell and he’d probably use the flames to light a cigarette before stopping to consider where he was. Hijikata didn’t question the destination, and Gintoki, for his part, didn’t question why. The bottom line was that it came in handy, particularly in moments like this.

“Deal,” he said.

* * *

The evil villain hideout was pretty standard as evil villain hideouts went, although this one was pretty clearly built on a budget. It was a small compound with five buildings scattered here and there made of dull, gray concrete, with everything fenced in by rusting barbed wire. When Gintoki pushed open the iron door to the main building, its rusted hinges screeched the alarm louder than any high tech sound system could have accomplished.

He stood in the entryway sword raised, and Kagura and Shinpachi readied themselves beside him. Everyone drew a breath and waited.

And waited.

“Um, Gin-san,” Shinpachi finally said. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Gintoki retorted, although he had just been mentally asking himself the same question. “They were probably just sleeping when we arrived and are now rushing to put on their pants to greet us.”

It had taken him and Kagura a good two weeks of canvassing the town in a mixture of unbearable summer heat up top and pruning moisture down below to sniff out these jackasses. Patsuan had joined their fruitless search near the end of the second week with a large chip still on his shoulder, but at least he wasn’t openly talking about it when Gintoki was in the room. A little healthy repression was all he could ask for. If everyone just pushed all their feelings down it would be a lot easier on everyone.

Splashing through the all-consuming wet below him, Gintoki started down one hallway, giving every door along it a hefty bang with his sword as he went.

“Oi, assholes! It’s breakfast time. Come and get some.”

Behind him, Kagura was kicking down doors, peering into the different rooms.

“No one’s here,” she said. “There are a lot of open notebooks and distinct, sparkling trinkets if we wanted to investigate the deep lore around this place, but it’s like everyone just disappeared.”

How was he supposed to find the stupid, evil weather machine if there wasn’t anyone around to kick the information out of? He made his way farther down the hall, opening a door at the end of it. There was a desk on the far side of the room with a doctor’s prescription pad, cases of some specialty ointments, and a laptop open to a screen of words of exposition he could not give less of a shit about. Instead, he toed open a closet to find moldy boxes and wrinkled clothes. Dammit.

As he continued the search, Shinpachi and Kagura’s lowered voices from down the hall reached his ears.

“I still can’t understand why solving this rain has suddenly become so important to him. He never tries this hard at anything,” Shinpachi was saying. “I mean, he’s been at this non-stop for weeks.”

“He’s not getting money for it,” Kagura replied. “I’ve been around him all the time lately, and he hasn’t been doing any of the things he usually does when he’s expecting a big paycheck, like splurging on sweets with money he doesn’t have yet or splurging on pachinko with money he doesn’t have yet.”

“And he’s not doing it for himself,” Shinpachi added. “The rain doesn’t seem to overly bother him, or when it does he just goes upstairs. If he lived on the first floor, maybe it would be different, but he seems fine.”

“So he’s doing it for someone else,” Kagura concluded. “Maybe you were right the first time when you asked him if it had to do with Mami 4.”

“No, definitely not,” Shinpachi shot her down without hesitation. “I thought it could be at first, but this job has gone on too long for that. The stupid dating thing is some sort of weird way for them to annoy each other or something, but what Gin-san’s doing to solve this weather problem… it’s serious. He’s taking it seriously. This isn’t another joke or prank. He’s doing it because it will mean something to someone he’s decided is important.”

There was a pause: dead air. Gintoki reached out to touch one of the jackets in the closet. It was damp. He fished around in the pockets.

“Maybe it’s for Ketsuno Ana,” Shinpachi suggested. “So that she can stop doing double weather reports. Or for Otose-san. We all see how the rain gets to her hip.”

Kagura responded so quietly that Gintoki couldn’t make out the words.

“I don’t know how you can believe that,” Shinpachi said. “There’s no way.”

Kagura spoke again, even softer than before. Only the faint hint of an indiscernible murmur made its way down the hallway. Gintoki drew a limp, half-disintegrated scrap of paper from the jacket pocket.

“It’s not real,” Shinpachi insisted.

Gintoki’s splashing footsteps echoed through the hallway, which immediately shut the kids up. They turned to greet him. Shinpachi looked confused, while Kagura was simply calm.

“What’s next?” she asked.

He tossed over the piece of paper.

“‘Dear Bobo-kun, In case you forget again,’” Shinpachi read, “‘here are the step-by-step instructions to get to our secret weather machine...’ Oi, that’s way too convenient! How did you even get this?”

“I got my hands wet,” Gintoki said.

* * *

The instructions guided them deep within the nearby forest. All the people missing from the evil villain lair seemed to be gathered there in a shaded clearing at the bottom of a hill, surrounding an overly-complex looking machine that was shooting out strange gases and beeping a lot.

“Why don’t we just go out and start punching?” Kagura asked from where she was kneeling behind a bush. “We can take ‘em.”

“There’s almost thirty of them,” Shinpachi said from behind a tree. “What if they have time to do something bad with the machine while we’re fighting? I think we should wait for them to leave then just try turning it off.”

Waiting around would take too long, and this whole ordeal had already taken two weeks too long. Gintoki was more than ready to agree with Kagura when he suddenly heard a rustling from behind them.

“There’s someone coming,” he hissed, and they all crouched down.

Was it a patrolling guard? Had they been found out?

The soft footsteps got closer and closer until a man emerged wearing a simple black kimono with a sword tied to his waist and a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck. He looked at the Yorozuya trio kneeling in the shrubbery and blinked.

“What the hell are you three doing here?” Hijikata asked.

Shinpachi opened his mouth and Gintoki slapped a hand over it. Somehow, the thought of Hijikata figuring out what he was up to was the worst.

“We’re having a picnic,” he said as Shinpachi glared a hole into the side of his head.

“Where’s your food?”

“We just finished,” Gintoki said, patting his belly with his free hand. “It was delicious. I am sorry I couldn’t share any with you, my unexpected tax-thief. I would have invited you if I had known it was your day off.”

That asshole had told him his next day off was on Monday, but here he was in his personal clothes on Friday wandering around suspicious places in the woods.

“It was a last minute thing,” Hijikata mumbled his obvious lie. “I didn’t know I’d have some free time until it happened, so I decided to use it to go...” he fumbled for a moment before pointing to his binoculars and saying, “bird watching.”

Everyone went silent, including the birds. In the pause, everyone heard a maniacal laugh coming from the direction of the clearing and someone saying ‘now we can finally implement stage three! Soon people will have no choice but to come to us for salvation… through salves!’

After another short moment, Hijikata spoke up, “Well, I might as well go check on that. Since I’m here. Not that I have any idea what it could be about, but I’m here anyway, so I might as well.”

As Hijikata stepped forward, Gintoki shot out a hand.

“Hey, hold on. You’re entering my picnic area. I have this whole place reserved for the entire day,” he said. “That means only myself and my guests get to be here. It also means that only we get to deal with problems occurring in my picnic area. Shinpachi, Kagura, and I will handle this. Why don’t you go watch some birds and then sleep on a pile of moss somewhere?”

What right did Hijikata have to get himself involved at this juncture? Gintoki was well aware the man had been working non-stop these past few weeks. Looking like the ghost of himself, just two days ago he had fallen asleep right in the middle of their lunch, his head dropping right onto his plate. That same afternoon, Sougo had told Gintoki that his futon had remained unused for a good week now.

If he finally had managed to squirrel away a moment of freedom, Hijikata should make the most of it and take a goddamn nap. Not that Gintoki cared or anything. It was just his right to get annoyed when people didn’t use common sense.

“I can’t even think of watching birds now that I know I can watch you instead,” Hijikata insisted like an asshole. “I’m going to take a little distance and watch you from that clearing over there.”

With that, he started walking right toward the weather machine.

“While I would normally be all in on such a perverted play, I don’t think I can handle that much distance from you right now. I need to be as close as I can get,” Gintoki said, grabbing Hijikata’s arm to stop the forward motion.

“No, this will be great, I promise,” Hijikata insisted, dragging himself forward.

“No, no, I can’t accept it,” Gintoki said, dragging the man back.

Their tug of war intensified until they both, at once, slipped on the sopping wet ground beneath them. After seconds of desperate flailing, they fell together down the hill right toward the group of weather manics, forming a wild ball of limbs and mud as they went. It was only when Gintoki had completely lost track of where his arms ended and Hijikata’s legs began that they finally rolled to a stop somewhere well beneath the clouds in the clearing. He opened his mouth to swear, but got a heavy rush of rainwater to choke on instead.

Surrounded by a heavy, humid darkness, Gintoki could barely make out the soaked and panting silhouette of Hijikata above him, while he lay half-swallowed by the pool of wet soil covering the ground. Not wasting a moment or a thought, he rolled their bodies together, so that he was on top of the pile and any weapons would have to tear through his own chest first before they could reach the chest below him.

“What are you doing?” Hijikata spat, and tried to roll them back.

To stop him, Gintoki scrabbled for purchase in the mud, but pressure from Hijikata movements had him slipping.

They rolled and rolled until they ended up hitting the trunk of a tree. Gintoki looked up at the mass of leaves swaying on the shaking branches above him.

Wait…

How could he see leaves? Where were the clouds?

Glancing to his side, he saw Kagura surrounded by a pile of unconscious bodies and Shinpachi with his hand on the weather machine’s large and entirely-too-obvious Off button.

* * *

Without the rain to soften it, the mud was no match for the summer heat. The wet, gooey mess that Gintoki’s fall had painted all over his body dried within minutes, caking and crusting him and Hijikata into brown piles of shit. Kagura plugged her nose as she looked down it at them.

“If this is the way you’re going to behave, we really can’t take you anywhere,” she scolded.

Shinpachi sighed, looked off to the side, and rustled his imaginary newspaper.

“I just don’t know what you kids were thinking,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m very disappointed.”

Mom? Dad?

Who were they to try and guilt-trip him!

“We’re sorry,” Hijikata muttered, looking strangely chastised. “It won’t happen again.”

Oi, dumbass! Don’t fall for it! You’re the adult here!

“I should think not,” Kagura harrumphed. “Now go call your friends to take away the bad men then buy us lunch.”

Well, if humiliating Hijikata got everyone some food, Gintoki supposed he could get on-board.

“Yeah, and make it quick so we can go and eat,” he said, which got him a hefty punch in the face.

A good bunch of dirt cracked and flew off his body as he was catapulted into a new pile of half-dried mud and debris.

“You’re not getting anything,” Hijikata stated darkly as he dialed. Putting the phone up to but still a good, clean distance away from his cheek, he spoke, “It’s me. There’s been a break in Case 136722. Get some cars and officers to my location so we can make some arrests.”

Jimmy’s responding exclamation was loud enough that even Gintoki could hear: “Oh! This is about that weather case you’ve been working during your spare time? Congratulations, Vice-Commander!”

Hijikata immediately glanced at Gintoki, checking in the most unsubtle way as to whether or not he’d heard that. Gintoki’s grin couldn’t have been wider.

“You dog,” he said.

“Shut up!” Hijikata yelled at no particular target, seeming to hope the command would hit everyone in a hundred kilometer radius.

With a mad ferocity, he threw his phone into the mud. Jimmy’s happy murmurings continued to bubble up unintelligibly from the muck

Even though he hadn’t had a spare moment, this guy had created the time to work on this. He must have invented a whole new 25th hour. But why? He had stated time and again that it wasn’t a Shinsengumi priority, which made it personal. It was almost like he did it because Gintoki kept bugging him about it.

But if that were true, Hijikata should have been shoving it in Gintoki’s face as proof that he was the Real Slim Shady in this whole dating thing. It was the perfect ammunition to fire in their Dating Fight Club, so why cover it up?

Poking out from beneath the dirt covering Hijikata’s face were splurts of red that summoned a heavy warmth to Gintoki’s chest.

“I mean, you shouldn’t have,” he cooed.

“Shut up!”

“Don’t worry, Hijikata-san,” Shinpachi said pointedly, “You’re not the only one. Gin-san has been working on solving the rain for weeks, pro bono.”

Dammit, Patsuan! Why did he have to go and throw him under the bus! Shooting him a vicious glare, Shinpachi just shrugged innocently.

“Really?” Hijikata asked, looking more surprised than anything else. “Your perm really was bugging you that much?”

Careful not to let his sudden relief show, Gintoki licked his lips. They were cracked, muddy, and dry.

“Yeah,” he said. “My hair is important to me, you know.”

Hijikata accepted that easily enough. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. As he did so, his eyes fluttered shut and for a moment it seemed like the exhaustion would take him right then and there, but gradually his eyes opened again, gaze as sharp and piercing as ever despite the unimaginable, ever-compounding strain that must be weighing every part of him down. Gintoki suddenly had to stop his hands from reaching up and dragging Hijikata back to the ground, keeping him there long enough for his eyes to close and breaths to deepen. Reflexively, Gintoki dug his nails into the cracks of the fast-drying ground.

“Well, here’s to better hair days,” Hijikata said, a whisper of a smile on his face and Gintoki could hardly stand it.

“Yeah,” he said desperately.

* * *

The walk back to his place was relatively silent. Kagura had decided to stick around with her Mami 4 to oversee the arrests, while Shinpachi and Gintoki took the road home. Shinpachi kept clearing his throat and glancing Gintoki’s way, opening his mouth and closing it again without actually saying anything.

If he thought Gin-san was going to help him out of whatever anxious loop he had gotten himself stuck in, he needed to think again. Gin-san didn't help people who threw him under buses.

Instead, Gintoki watched his own feet hit solid ground like he hadn’t been able to do in months. He looked at the footprints his boots left behind. Proof of his path was no longer hidden and washed away.

“Um, Gin-san,” Shinpachi finally said.

Gintoki grunted.

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

Raising his gaze, Gintoki found the guilty look on Patsuan’s face. Was he really feeling that bad about ratting Gintoki out? If Gintoki were being honest, which, incidentally, he had no plans on being, he had probably deserved it.

“I should have believed you,” Shinpachi continued. “I just… found it hard to believe, you know?”

Actually, no. He didn’t know.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, idly scratching his ear.

“You and Hijikata-san,” Shinpachi clarified. “I hope you know that the only reason I wasn’t supportive was because I thought you weren’t being serious – that it was some stupid game between the two of you. I’m sorry it took me so long to acknowledge the truth.”

Shinpachi looked at him earnestly like he was doing something important by saying these words, and, in a way, Gintoki supposed that he was. This kid was the last person to get the wool pulled over his eyes and acknowledge the lie.

“I’m glad you finally figured it out,” Gintoki said.

Shinpachi had been so close to discovering the farce, but now he’d finally fallen in line with all the rest of them. It was almost strange how easily they had all swallowed the story, how believable this insane scenario apparently was to everyone, but their belief made everything easier on Gintoki, so who was he to question it?

“Yeah, me too,” Shinpachi replied. “Now that I get it, I promise I’m behind you on this one 100%.”

And he was. The most helpful thing Shinpachi could do in this situation was to believe Gintoki’s bullshit. That meant Gintoki was that much closer to winning this…

Winning this, yeah. That was what he was doing. He was going to win this thing.

That was he told himself the next morning as he ate his rice while pretending not to notice the strange glances both kids were sending his way. It’s what he repeated when he went out drinking with Hasegawa the next evening, schmoozing enough free sake out of everyone that the mantra turned fuzzy in his mind. It’s what he told himself the following day when he saw Hijikata again and the first thing he checked was the depths of the bags under his eyes and the length of the shadowed stubble around his lips and chin. It’s what he mumbled to himself as he pulled down the handle on the pachinko machine.

He told himself he was going to win so many times that the word ‘win’ had completely lost all meaning. What was winning again?

He asked himself this as Hijikata sent a Muneno Tanima to seduce him. He questioned the concept as he brought that same Hijikata to the steps of a love hotel and watched him panic. He thought about it as Hijikata refused his play and challenged him to a cherry boy marriage instead.

What was winning again?

Huddled against the counter of a late night bar, five rounds of sake deep, Hijikata goaded him forward and onward. He had raised the stakes to marriage and now the question had become whether or not Gintoki would rise to the challenge.

“Oi, Yorozuya,” the dumbass drunk said, snickering. “Do you take this cherry boy or not?”

Hijikata’s head thumped roughly against his own arms on the counter. He chuckled into his hands. It really must have been the sake, but after everything, Gintoki was feeling… something. He had completely lost sight of a winning play, but was certain the answer lay somewhere around here. Right here. He nudged it.

“Alright! Fine,” Gintoki mumbled into his cup. “You’ll be happy if I become Mr. Cherry-Boy, is that it?”

Spitting right onto his arm, Hijikata said, “Like you’re actually gonna do it.”

“Maybe I am!”

“Maybe you will!”

After a moment of confused silence, where neither of them were quite sure what to do next, they moved as one, clinking their glasses together and downing the sake within. It burned down Gintoki’s throat and left him with a strange, fiery resolve.

“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll go through with it, I go through with all of it, if you do one thing for me.”

“What?” Hijikata slurred, barely conscious.

Swallowing, Gintoki replied, “There’s a ghost out there, and I need you to help me kill it.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are no Trains that run parallel to this particular station. There are no wine pairings for this flavor. There is only one side to this story.

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who watched The Sixth Sense a lot. It was about ghosts, and he kept seeing ghosts of his own, so it made a lot of, well, _sense_ to him.

He got a plastic lunch box with a picture of Bruce Willis on the front, and then he drew over Bruce Willis with a white crayon so that it felt like more of a The Sixth Sense lunch box than a generic Bruce Willis lunch box. He carried the Bruce Willis lunch box to school every day, and the rest of the kids must have thought that was weird because they ignored him the same way that Bruce Willis’ wife ignored Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

He was fine with that. He was fine with the solitude. It just meant that he was becoming even more like Haley Joel Osment, the lonely little boy in The Sixth Sense who could see ghosts, with his very own Bruce Willis keeping him company on his Bruce Willis lunch box. He was sure it was because of his connection with Haley that he could speak fluently to the dead he had known, and why those dead would constantly, constantly, constantly,_ constantly_ whisper to him.

However, the more the little boy saw The Sixth Sense, and the more he went to school with his Bruce Willis lunch box, the more he realized that his first impression of himself in relation to the movie wasn’t quite right, which was an appropriate conclusion to come to when it came to things related to The Sixth Sense.

He started paying attention to more than just the moments when he was bringing his Bruce Willis lunch box to school or taking his Bruce Willis lunch box away from school. He focused on the moments when he was in school, at lunch. He paid attention to the moment in the day when he would open the Bruce Willis lunch box.

“Do you know what was inside?” a young Zura asked, his eyes bright with mischief from where he sat cross-legged beneath the speckled shade of a tree, as they all took a midday break from Shouyou-sensei’s lessons.

“Candy,” Gintoki declared more out of personal preference than anything else.

“Don’t be stupid. It was empty,” Takasugi asserted confidently despite his earlier claims that he wouldn’t pay attention to any stupid story. “That’s the point. The kid was dead all along.”

Zura laughed and shook his head.

“Inside was rice, pickled vegetables, and salmon. An ordinary lunch,” he said, “because it doesn’t take any special powers to haunt or be haunted. To be among ghosts is to be...”

* * *

“You stole a dead guy’s meat buns?” Hijikata slurred out of the one side of his mouth not squished against the counter top.

This was why Gintoki never told stories to drunks that required listening comprehension. They always missed every part of every point.

“No. My landlady gave them to me,” he asserted to everyone who might be listening in the bar, corporeal or not. “If you think about it, since she gave me the meat buns that she had been planning to give to him, it was really her that stole them from their rightful owner. I’m blameless.”

Hijikata took a pause to digest this.

“I would definitely haunt the shit outta you if you stole my meat buns,” he hiccuped.

It had been half a year since Gintoki had maybe taken the tiniest bite or two out of a small fraction of what might have once been intended to be Terada’s meat buns. If the guy had been upset enough by that innocent act to haunt him for it, doing so for this long was just plain petty.

Not that ghosts were real or anything… Although, Gintoki wasn’t able to find any more reasonable explanation for why he was suddenly on the verge of getting engaged to none other than Mr. Supreme Vice-Cherry of the worst boys club in town.

“But don’t worry!” Hijikata suddenly exclaimed mid-swallow, spraying liquid everywhere. “I’ll take care of it!”

Gintoki snatched the sake cup right out of his hand and downed the rest of it in one urgent swallow. He was doing the bar a public service at this point, really.

“I will!” Hijikata insisted, slamming his cup-less fist on the table. “Don’t think I won’t!”

He lifted up a bowl of salted peanuts and cashews on the counter top and roughly pressed his finger down into different parts of it. After a pause, he lifted the bowl to his ear, causing the nuts to rain down his shoulder and onto his lap. As soon as the bartender started yelling in his direction, Hijikata shushed him furiously.

“Shut up! It’s ringing!”

A pause.

“Yamsocky? It’s me. There’s-there’s this thing I need ya to take care of. Yeah, thanks.”

He placed the empty bowl down on the table with a look of complete pride and satisfaction.

“There, it’s done,” he said before paling and looking around. “Where’d my sake go?”

* * *

It wasn’t the first time the two of them had gotten their asses kicked out of an evening establishment, but it was definitely the first time where Gintoki hadn’t played much of any part in it. No, he definitely hadn’t been the one who got into a fist fight with that support beam while slurring out the My Neighbor Pedoro theme song at the top of his lungs.

Hijikata was far more wasted than Gintoki could ever remember seeing him. After extending his challenge to marriage, he had been downing drinks like there would be no tomorrow.

Well, if they actually went through with it, there really wouldn’t be a Hijikata tomorrow, so Gintoki supposed he could see the point.

Not that the general sense of understanding made a difference when Hijikata started barfing on his boots.

“Oi! Asshole! You finally stop trying to copy my footwear just in time to ruin them?” he accused, shifting the projectile vomiter so that his spray was getting his own shoes instead of Gintoki’s.

The crowd on the street smoothly parted around them like Hijikata’s spit and bile had created a magical force field that kept the rest of the world at least a good meter away, and holding their noses as they did so.

Hijikata wiped his lips with an already-crusty sleeve.

“Your shoes are safe and sound,” he announced. “I just dyed them another color.”

“That’s all you have to say for yourself?” Gintoki exclaimed.

“It’s okay,” Hijikata assured him. “I’m pretty sure I can dye them a different color if you don’t like this shade.”

He knelt on the ground in front of Gintoki’s boots, putting a finger in his mouth in preparation to gag.

“What color do you want?” he asked.

Was this idiot so wasted that he thought he could change the hue of his barf on demand? Gintoki wasn’t sure he knew what stage of drunk that was.

He kicked Hijikata lightly, with just enough force so that the guy lost his balance and toppled backward onto the dirty street.

“Hey! What was that for?” Hijikata roughly accused the ground and threw up on it in what appeared to be a strange attempt to show it who was boss.

As a good portion of his stomach acid settled into a small puddle, glistening in the moonlight, Hijikata staggered to his feet, swaying like a flag stuck in the dirt of an abandoned battlefield.

“Alright,” Gintoki said, “lets get your ass back to the Shinsengumi side of town, so you can become their problem and stop becoming mine.”

Gintoki wrapped a sweaty, smelly arm around his own shoulders, and put his own arm around a sweaty, smelly waist. He began dragging Hijikata forward, really, literally dragging him, because the asshole wasn’t even willing to extend the effort to lift his feet to take a goddamn step.

It almost seemed like Hijikata was actively dragging his heels and squirming into more and more cumbersome positions, striving to become an awkward dead weight, while Gintoki must be looking more and more like a sweaty nerd dragging his shamefully lewd body pillow through the streets.

The temptation to just drop Hijikata on the floor somewhere was growing stronger by the minute.

But he wouldn’t. No matter how much he wanted to let sleeping police dogs lie.

Just like before. … The smile from before. The first time. Not the second.

And that… what it was… that was really why he was here in the first place, wasn’t he?

…

“Gintoki,” Hijikata pronounced his name like he was exhaling a cloud of smoke he had kept nestled in his lungs for a particularly long while.

Blinking away the distant feeling of a memory Gintoki couldn’t quite grasp or quantify, he swiveled his gaze to look at the drunk piece-of-shit taking up all of the real estate his shoulder had to offer.

He suddenly felt like asking Hijikata why he had chosen tonight, right after pulling the marriage card, to utilize humanity’s best available substitute for an actual brain-washing machine, but it was a pointless question. Gintoki already knew the answer. Instead of backing off from a challenge he himself had put forward, Hijikata had simply decided to forget it had ever happened.

Not that Gintoki cared or anything.

It was just a coward’s move to forget, that was all. He felt the strongest urge to point that out.

“Gintoki,” Hijikata repeated urgently.

“If you say my name one more time, I’ll Beetlejuice you,” he threatened idly.

“Did I do it?” Hijikata asked. “Did I get rid of your ghost?”

“You didn’t get rid of shit.”

Hijikata’s lips pursed.

“I thought Yammypocky’s plan would work flawlessly. It shud’ve done.”

Gintoki spared a moment of silence for the uneaten nuts scattered carelessly under Hijikata’s long-vacated bar stool a few blocks back.

“Don’t you worry,” Hijikata exclaimed. “I have a… I have a backup plan.”

“Ah, but I will only approve of it if it is the same as my plan,” Gintoki said. “which is to throw you over the wall of the Shinsengumi barracks in order to jumpstart your polevaulting career, my ambitious alcoholic.”

Hijikata seemed to consider this for a moment before shaking his head firmly.

“No. There’s somewhere else we needa go. I know someone who can help us get the tools we need ta ‘rest the dead.”

If it were any other person, Gintoki might have been able to safely assume they had made the drunk’s mistake of switching around their words, actually intending to say ‘put the dead to rest.’ However, he was dealing with a guy who easily could be wanting to put handcuffs on a ghost here, so there was really no way of knowing what the hell he actually meant.

“Ta ‘rest the dead!” Hijikata repeated emphatically, helping no one.

* * *

By the time they had reached the house, Hijikata had become less of a Death Stranding mission, and was actually starting to wobble and walk on his own two feet. He staggered his way to the front door and banged on it hard enough to wake the neighborhood. True to form, bedroom lights in nearby houses blinked on and a pair of dogs started barking furiously.

“This situation is starting to make me feel like a scumbag. Like I’m some sort of lowlife debt collector. Or your average cop,” Gintoki said.

“It’s fine,” Hijikata insisted. “She told me to come by any time of day or night.”

Did this dumbass not know a pickup line when he heard one? Was it calls like these that were keeping him busy all week?

“It sounds like she really wanted you to come by at night. Like you are right now.”

“No, no, it’s not like that. She’s married. Or she was. She’s divorced… or widowed? I feel like she told me her ex-husband disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”

“And now you want us to disappear? Is that your strategy?” Gintoki asked, taking a few big steps away from the front door. “Do you think if we become missing persons, ghosts will begin to miss us as well?”

At once, the door slowly started to open inward. Gintoki froze, staring dumbly at the person standing in the entryway.

Hijikata looked back and forth between the two of them.

“Oh, so you know each other?” he asked.

"Right now, I genuinely wish we didn’t,” Gintoki replied, turning his back on the whole business as he began to walk away.

Hijikata grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him forward.

“Don’t be rude. She’s helped me out of a bind a number of times, like when I was running low on mayo, or that other time I was running low on mayo.”

“Is that all it takes to buy you these days?”

“She didn’t buy anything,” Hijikata insisted. “She has just been a good citizen! Helping me out in my times of need and asking for nothing in return. I am sure she will help us now as well!”

“Yes, of course,” the dumbass chimed in, the sleeve of a stupidly elegant, deep-blue kimono lifted to partially cover a faintly smiling mouth. “I am always more than happy to assist you to the best of my ability, Hijikata-dono. All of my admittedly limited resources are entirely at your disposal.”

“See,” Hijikata proclaimed, as if the universe had just spelled out a sign in the stars declaring he was right about every and anything, and Gintoki was always stupid and wrong. “She said she’ll help us.”

“Is that so?” he replied. “Well, you really don’t need me here for that, I’m sure, so just let me go and do what you need to do.”

“It’s your problem! You need to be here for the solution,” Hijikata insisted and dragged him through the damned threshold.

Gintoki stood scowling in the middle of the small, single-story house – wooden walls, ceiling, and floor half gone to rot and decorated with only the barest essentials. There was one chair, one couch, one table, a kitchen, and presumably a toilet somewhere. All put together, the necessary demands of living could take place, but not much else. Although, Gintoki doubted much of anything took place here, except when Hijikata showed up. That very Hijikata took a seat on a small, lumpy couch with a casual familiarity that hinted at dozens of other visits. He made himself comfortable, as the asshole made them tea.

“If I remember correctly,” the asshole said, “you like yours with a bit of sugar, don’t you, Gintoki-dono?”

“I like my tea far away from here,” he snapped.

Hijikata looked at him like he had just punched a baby in the face.

“What’s your problem?”

“My problem?” Gintoki pretended to give it some thought. “I think my biggest problem right now is that I’m not sure exactly how many more times I’m going to have to offend your delicate sensibilities before you give up on whatever your shitty idea is!”

Having apparently regained enough dexterity for a smoke, Hijikata flicked his lighter and scoffed.

“Too bad I have a pretty thick skin,” he said, and guilelessly accepted a cup of tea from the last person he should want to. “And I know for a fact that you do too, don’t you, Zurako-san?”

“My name isn’t Zurako it’s – actually, wait, it _is_ Zurako. My mistake,” Zura twittered, and thrust a milky cup in Gintoki’s direction.

“No, the mistake is all mine,” Gintoki said, grasping the cup solemnly.

The last thing on Earth he wanted to do besides invent a virus that completely eradicated the human ability to taste sweetness was to get caught in the middle of the Shinsengumi and Joui’s cat and mouse shit. He particularly had no interest in witnessing Zura catfish a dumbass.

“I appreciate your willingness to shoulder my burdens, Gintoki-dono, but tonight’s visit is for the express purpose of me shouldering yours, is it not?” Zura asked at a pitch just high enough to be appropriately androgynous, settling into the threadbare wicker chair next to the couch. “Please, if you will, take a seat and tell me what it is that troubles you.”

With the chair taken, all that was left was a few centimeter’s worth of space that Hijikata wasn’t taking up on the lumpy couch. Hijikata patted it like it was some sort of viable solution. Not to be outdone, Gintoki lay down, spreading out across the entire couch, using Hijikata’s lap as a pillow, his boots dirtying the opposite armrest, in a move that in competitive couch-ing circles was known as the ‘[Ian You Prick Move Over](https://imgur.com/S3cs7Hk).’

Hijikata’s legs were bony sticks, and being horizontal on this tiny couch cramped Gintoki’s spine in catastrophic ways that he would certainly be regretting for weeks, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him from making this as uncomfortable as he possibly could for everyone else in the room.

However, Zura just looked faintly amused, while Hijikata accepted the new burden with nothing more than a soft grumble and half a sigh.

“Is this what you do all the time?” Gintoki asked to Hijikata’s nostrils and chin. “Do you sit on this couch and talk about top secret missions and classified government plans with this oh-so-trustworthy mayo-giver of yours? No wonder you never have time to buy me food.”

“I would never talk about work with an outsider, you know that,” Hijikata said, looking more annoyed with him now than when he had first ‘Ian You Prick Move Over’ed. “We rarely talk, but when we do, it’s not about anything much.”

“The weather, what weather does to mayonnaise, what mayonnaise could do to weather with the right kind of infrastructure, that sort of thing,” Zura supplied. “Occasionally, he even finds it in himself to complain about you.”

“I didn’t know the two of you knew each other,” was Hijikata’s weak defense to that.

Despite everything, Gintoki found himself deathly curious.

“He complained? How is that possible? I am a model human being.”

“He said you are needlessly stubborn and strangely inscrutable at the worst possible times, but mainly he just called you an asshole.”

“Sure, I may have… maybe I called you an asshole, but she’s lying about the rest,” Hijikata mumbled, like the other descriptors were comparatively a necessarily guarded super secret on par with nuclear launch codes.

“Say what you will about that, but I believe one point we can both agree on is that we do not talk business here,” Zura said, needlessly reaffirming what had already been stated while holding Gintoki’s gaze.

In a disguise he had apparently used to coerce the Shinsengumi’s Vice-Commander into conversation many times, Zura wanted Gintoki to believe that this wasn’t about business. He may be drunk, but he wasn’t _that _wasted.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“I had meant to tell you about it earlier, when it first happened, but you weren’t taking my calls,” Zura said pointedly.

Gintoki remembered a rainy day, weeks ago, when Zura had stalked around his place in the middle of the night. It wasn’t Gintoki’s fault that he hadn’t felt like talking. The guy could have just left a note or something.

But if Zura had started all this recently and he was claiming it wasn’t about business...

“Why?”

“I couldn’t help it. I was worried.”

Zura didn’t even manage to gather up enough human decency to look embarrassed about his words. He simply directed a frown Gintoki’s way like it was all Gintoki’s fault that he was in this situation.

Well, it sure wasn’t his fault Zura was a meddlesome asshole, and he was about to say so when a stream of steaming hot tea started raining down onto his face.

Jumping up with a howl, he vigorously wiped himself with his sleeve.

“What the hell! Why did – ”

When Gintoki lifted his gaze away from damp material of his yukata, he saw Hijikata slumped over, limp and entirely unconscious. Zura coughed awkwardly into his fist.

“Well, I didn’t expect it to work quite so well, and so quickly,” he said. “Has Hijikata-dono been consuming much in the way of alcoholic beverages this evening?”

Immediately Gintoki stepped forward, putting his hand to Hijikata’s mouth to find a breath, and then to his wrist to find a steady pulse. Only when he found both did he turn to stare a hole through Zura’s face.

“Did you drug him?” he asked. “He just about drank his own weight in sake, oi!”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Zura had the audacity to look offended.

“What, am I just supposed to assume you’ll drug people unless I casually mention they’ve been having a wild night about the town?”

“I just gave him a little something that would serve to make our meeting a bit blurry,” Zura said, standing up and gathering the shards of the broken teacup from the floor. “It seemed to be in both of our best interests that Hijikata-dono retains no memory of this evening, wouldn’t you say?”

Zura had way too much confidence in Hijikata’s intelligence, and in his ability to think logically when mayo was involved.

“Even with both of us in the same room, he wouldn’t have connected the dots about who you actually are. Even if he did, why should I care?”

“If he were to uncover the plot, I am sure Hijikata-dono would not approve of me getting to know him in this way. Nor would he approve of you by association, and I wouldn’t want to be the cause of any strain on your remarkable relationship,” Zura spoke as he dropped the shards of the teacup into a small trash bin. “To that effect, Zurako will disappear permanently from this house after tonight. It is time to bury the mystery.”

Zura was going to ground just like that? It either meant he had been truthful about his motives or he had already got what he came for – using this as his opportunity to bounce. Gintoki searched his heart, wondering if it was actually possible for him to care less than he did now about which of the two options it actually was.

“Besides,” Zura continued, “I want our first _true_ meeting to go right. The first meeting of your best friend and your paramour is paramount.”

“You’ve met Hijikata hundreds of times. He prints out posters of you and puts them around town. I would go so far as to say he’s a big fan of yours. Maybe you should think about giving him your autograph sometime.”

“But this time we will be meeting in a different context on different terms,” Zura insisted. “Here’s how I see it happening: We are all in the midst of a battlefield. The Shinsengumi and the Joui are crossing swords. Our lives are all on the line. Suddenly, you stand tall and yell, ‘I can no longer fight!’”

“Who am I fighting?” Gintoki asked.

“The Shinsengumi, of course.”

“Why?”

“You are fighting with me and the rest of the honorable rebels of this tyrannical regime!”

“That doesn’t sound like me.”

“Just… just, let me finish,” Zura said in a tone approaching a whine.

Gintoki shrugged and yawned, plopping down into the chair Zura had just vacated, letting his legs fall on Hijikata’s chest.

“As I was saying,” Zura continued, “you say you can no longer fight.”

“Did I remember I had to go buy the newest issue of Jump!?” Gintoki asked.

“You say you can no longer fight,” Zura steamrolled onward, “and that scoundrel, Kondo Isao, of the Shinsengumi asks you why. You tell him that you are in love! You yell it to the rooftops!”

“I do really like Jump!,” Gintoki agreed.

“And that is when the Shinsengumi’s second-in-command cries out, ‘So am I, Gintoki! So. Am. I,’” Zura exclaimed, pacing back and forth, quickly getting enraptured by his own narrative. “The two of you rush across the field of destruction, passionately embracing, holding onto each other with a true intimacy despite the large audience. No one speaks. There is silence… until! A sword clattering to the ground echoes across the field. It is I! Katsura Kotarou! I have dropped my weapon. Everyone turns to me and they see me standing there. At once, I begin to slow clap. That is when Kondo drops his weapon and begins his slow clap, but we all know who did it first. The rest of the warriors, Shinsengumi and Joui alike, drop their weapons and join in. We are all clapping for you. After a moment in your arms, Hijikata-dono turns to look at me. I gave him a nod and a thumbs up, and that, Gintoki,” – Zura shot a finger gun in his direction with a terrible wink – “is how I meet your man.”

He held the pose for far longer than was necessary as the room went silent.

“Zura, do you have any more of that tea left?” Gintoki asked.

“It’s not Zura, it’s Zurako, and you still have some left in your cup,” Zura replied, gesturing to the table.

“No, not that stuff. The tea Hijikata had. I’d like to forget about all this too,” he said.

“Well, tonight you’re going to be the one that remembers.”

Gintoki watched his own boots slowly rise and fall atop Hijikata’s chest. Hijikata’s head had collapsed against the armrest, neck at an awkward angle, as a strand of drool wormed its way down his chin. There was the faint ghost of a smile on his face.

“How do I wake him up?” Gintoki asked.

“In this case, a small stimulant should do it,” Zura replied. “Get him a coffee from the vending machine down the street. You could probably shake him awake enough to swallow, and the caffeine would do the rest.”

Zura threw something his way and Gintoki caught it on reflex.

“Consider this my contribution.”

When Gintoki opened his hand, he found a 50 yen coin nestled neatly inside.

* * *

By the time Hijikata groaned and swore his way back to consciousness, it was almost midnight. He staggered upright, massaging his forehead as he slowly looked around.

“What’s with all the fireflies?” he asked.

“It’s their season,” Gintoki replied.

This summer in particular was an extra-shitty level of humid. Ketsuno Ana had mentioned all of that accumulated rainfall right before the hottest weeks of the year may have had something to do with it. Whatever it was, this heat and humidity provided a stage for most bugs to thrive like never before.

Nowadays, out on the edges of the city, where the artificial lights of lamps and storefronts began to fade, a winking and blinking of a more natural kind quickly rushed in to replace the illumination that had been lost. The farther you went, the more immersed you became in the chaos of a lightning storm. Up here on the high hills a good pair of kilometers outside the city limits, Gintoki was finding it hard enough to just open his mouth without letting some light in.

He took another drink from the bottle of sake he had snatched from Zura’s before heading out, now more than half empty. After he had his fill, he held it out to Hijikata who duly accepted it, took a swig, and winced.

“Ugh,” he said. “Too sweet. Tastes like cherries.”

“More for me then,” Gintoki replied.

It was a flavor he wasn’t embarrassed to enjoy. He sipped in silence, easily ignoring Hijikata’s imploring, darting glances, as the man clearly mentally willed him to speak.

A pair of fireflies clinked against his bottle and plummeted together to the ground.

The seconds passed.

Finally, Hijikata’s curiosity seemed to win over his pride, and he said, “We were just on our way to get meat buns from Zurako-san. You were going to use them as an offering to placate your ghost...”

Ah, so that was what he wanted to try. An interesting plan, but it wouldn’t have worked.

“I realized that I had been going after the wrong ghost,” he said.

“Is that what we’re doing here?”

“So you know where ‘here’ is?” Gintoki countered.

“Yes,” Hijikata said, eyes sweeping out to the horizon and back. “When I first came to the city, this was the one place I found that most easily reminded me… Well, sometimes I would come here to think.”

Gintoki absorbed this without comment. He looked at the field of fireflies and knew that he would never see what Hijikata saw in this sprawling, sloping field connected to a simple, solemn sky

“Why do _you_ know of this place?” Hijikata asked him.

“We came here together. Once,” Gintoki replied.

“You and I did? When?”

After a moment, he admitted, “I can’t remember.”

It had been almost more than he could manage to summon the knowledge that it had been here. That stupid smile and everything else. It had happened here.

Why couldn’t he remember what it was? Why couldn’t he see more than ghosts and phantoms?

“I can’t remember either,” Hijikata said, and then, “Which means it must have been right around two and half years ago.”

Gintoki almost dropped the bottle.

“What?”

“If we came here and I don’t remember, it could only have been then,” Hijikata asserted easily, like he had been asked to point out a dog in a lineup of what was otherwise clearly cats. “I don’t come up here often, and I remember when I do. The only time I would have been drinking enough to forget would have been two and half years ago.”

He had been drinking enough. He had been drinking more than enough, Gintoki recalled vaguely.

Hijikata looked at him with a hesitance he rarely showed then quickly turned away. He swallowed and retrieved a cigarette from his pocket.

“Two and half years ago,” he attempted.

A pause. He fumbled about for his lighter.

“Two and a half years ago was when she died,” Hijikata said softly and, among the fireflies, forged his own small flame for half a moment.

* * *

They hadn’t known each other for too long by then, but that wasn’t why Gintoki had forgotten about it. The memory had escaped the day after it happened, as simple as an inhale one moment, and an exhale the next – only remaining a part of him for as long as he experienced it.

It had started when he literally tripped over him, which startled Hijikata awake with a yelp.

“Whaddaya doing here, Yozzya,” he slurred aggressively, waving a limp, accusatory fist. “Civs dun get to enter without a damn good reason.”

Gintoki looked around himself at the crowded, public street. The night air stank of booze and bad choices, but usually those bad choices got to be his, and he wasn’t in a great mood to deal with anyone else’s.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” he mumbled, continuing on his way until someone grabbed him by the ankle.

Hijikata held on tight like Gintoki’s leg was his next bottle of sake.

Well, it certainly had a kick to it.

“I’ve gotta job for you,” Hijikata said, wiping at his bloody nose with an errant sleeve, while still refusing to let go.

Gintoki had had far more than his fill of work from the Shinsengumi lately, particularly relating to their VC and spicy snacks on large, lonely hospital rooftops. It had roughly shoved him into the uncomfortable position of knowing far too much about someone he still hardly knew anything about. It was high time he found some distance from it all.

“So sorry, but I’m completely filled up at the moment. I might be able to schedule something in two or three years from now though. How about you try again then?”

Hijikata stared at him firmly with a gravitas few drunks managed to possess.

“It’s important,” he said, and it was subtle, but Gintoki could still pinpoint the place where his voice had quivered right between the im and the port.

“Give me your phone,” Gintoki sighed out. “I’ll call one of your groupies.”

“No,” he insisted with fury. “None of them – they can’t know.”

With the Shinsengumi’s cult commune, bunk bed lifestyle, it was easy to assume they probably already knew, no matter how they might act in his presence. Things that had you dead drunk on the streets weren’t something an organization of that kind would easily overlook. Gintoki wondered if his bluster was genuine ignorance talking, or the necessary pretense to play his part.

“So you don’t want the sordid rumors making the rounds at the next family reunion, huh? What do you expect me to do about it?” he asked.

“I need you to take me some… somewhere.”

“I know a taxi driver that can keep a secret.”

“Is notta place that can be reached by roads.”

With every word, Hijikata seemed to be trying his damnedest to raise the stakes to whole new levels of annoying.

“If you need my help with this,” Gintoki said, “you'd better be prepared to pay up a pretty penny, mayo bastard.”*

“Fine,” he agreed without hesitation.

It took the better part of two hours to drag them both to where Hijikata vaguely pointed at each crossroads and intersection. It was one of the higher hills on the distant outskirts of town.

A little ways down on the other side of the peak, facing away from the metropolis, Gintoki could even imagine there was no city nearby at all. The only sounds were the distant chirping of cicadas and the only light was that reflected by a sliver of a setting moon.

He let a snoring Hijikata drop to the ground and roll a few meters down the hill into the thicker brush.

It took some time, but when Hijikata crawled his way out of the bramble patch, he was slightly more awake and bloody than when he had entered, skin torn apart by thorns.

“Asshole,” he snapped with a little more generic sobriety than when they had last spoke.

Gintoki was going to have to remember rolling around in a bed of stabby plants as a possible pick-me-up for other people who asked him to drag them across half the Earth.

“You owe me 100,000 yen, by the way, and if you want a return trip, you’re looking at double.”

Hijikata glared with venom.

“I should never have asked you for anything. That was my mistake. Get lost.”

Gintoki didn’t need to be told twice. Without a second glance, he started walking back down to the city. His futon was calling to him with music sweeter than any siren’s song; he could hear it way out there in the distance.

Besides, Hijikata seemed more aware now. He could make his way back just fine on his own. Even if he couldn’t, a short nap in the grass wouldn’t hurt him. It’s not like any Joui would set up camp here in the boondocks. Despite their bluster, many had gotten used to the more creature comforts and wouldn’t survive a week without a place with a good TV to watch their favorite historical dramas.

No one would be out patrolling this area and just stumble upon a drunk Hijikata whose reflexes were currently shot to hell… No one would trip over him like Gintoki had just tripped over him earlier…

It’s not like anything would happen…

Probably not.

The odds of this panning out _not _in his favor were slim, and whenever Gintoki gambled and played the odds things turned out great. Except when they didn’t, but that wasn’t the norm… Except when he was on a losing streak.

When was the last time he won something? It had been a little while. Pachinko machines hadn’t even been giving him back anywhere near what he gave them, rock-paper-scissors with Kagura was an unmitigated disaster... He just hadn’t been lucky lately. Would his luck – or lack thereof – transfer over to Hijikata on a night like this?

Not that he was superstitious or anything.

Not that he cared or anything.

Gintoki stopped at the bottom of the hill. He stood there, silently.

“Dammit,” he snapped, and turned back around.

By the time he made it back up the hill, the crescent moon had sunk below the horizon and a light scattering of clouds blocked most of the stars, leaving nothing but a harsh, all-encompassing darkness. Gintoki peered into it, searching for signs of movement – a bending of shadow, a crunch of grass, anything – but finding nothing. Had Hijikata left? Had he wandered deeper into the hills beyond the city? Or was he here, right in front of Gintoki, but keeping still enough not to be spotted?

Suddenly, a flare of light caught his eye. It was distant, but there. Gintoki walked toward it.

He found Hijikata on the crest of another hill, softly illuminated by the burning glow of his cigarette. A faint, shadowed view of his facial features was all Gintoki could see, but it was completely wrong.

Lips were pressed firmly together, but stretched wide and upward. Eyelids were hooded over a gaze much gentler than their owner ever would have allowed of his own volition, with nearby skin scrunched along faintly defined laugh lines. It was cheerful – almost annoyingly upbeat in how it naturally broadcast relief –, but alongside all of that there was an undercurrent of…

Tragedy?

Gintoki realized he had stumbled into an intimate moment once again. He was witnessing what no one should see, and Hijikata didn’t seem to realize he was there.

He finished one cigarette, then another. His face was softly illuminated then gradually, gently swallowed by the darkness again and again. Gintoki had no conception of how much time had passed.

At once, Hijikata puffed a cloud of smoke to the sky and whispered, “I am more because of you. You were everything and I... I hate that I know there will never be anyone else.”

As Hijikata stood on that hillside and spoke to no one in ways he would surely never remember in the morning, Gintoki stood at his side, silently haunting the stage. In that moment, he found he would have done anything to raise the dead, but the only ghost in that moment was him.

As a ghost, he couldn’t act, he couldn’t touch or influence the world, but he could feel, and he felt it all to an extent that was truly overwhelming.

He couldn’t understand why. Why the hell did he have to care?

“Who’s there?” Hijikata demanded, and Gintoki wondered how he had given himself away.

“The spook of the hill,” he said, voice raspy and low. “You have trespassed in my domain for far too long. You must leave at once.”

Hijikata paused, then nodded once, looking a little shaky.

“Okay,” he said. “Real sorry about that, sir. Won’t do it again.”

He started to walk away in a hurry, but stopped after only a few steps. He squared his shoulders and drummed up some courage.

“If you’re a ghost, could you tell another ghost something?”

“Of course,” Gintoki said.

“Could you tell her that I...”

A stilted breath.

Another.

And another.

“Nevermind,” he said, and fled.

Gintoki followed him at a distance all the way down the hills and back to the city. It was only when Hijikata got into a cab and sped down the street that Gintoki began walking the other way. He stumbled back to his place and immediately found the bottle he kept in the back of his closet in his room. He drank until both it and his mind were completely empty. He drank to bury feelings that had no place under the moon or sun.

* * *

“So you remembered whatever-it-was then?” Hijikata asked.

“Why do you say that?” Gintoki challenged.

“You were definitely having a flashback moment just then. For sure,” Hijikata insisted. “You were looking off into the distance all contemplative and silent, and I could have sworn there was melancholy violin music for a second there.”

There had definitely been none of those things.

“So it’s true,” Gintoki said. “Chainsmoking will make your mind go beautiful after a while.”

“Idiot. Stop avoiding reality.”

He wasn’t. Not anymore.

Maybe he could have if Hijikata hadn’t come in with his fake love confessions and stupid dating battles. If Hijikata had never saw fit to focus his attention on him, Gintoki could have easily spent the rest of his life convinced that he had never wanted him to.

He wouldn’t have needed to remember this place, or that smile, or any of the multitudes either of them contained.

“I know what you are, but what am I?” he said profoundly.

Hijikata looked tempted to violence, but he just gritted his teeth and shook his head.

“Whatever. Did we at least get your ghost?”

Gintoki slapped a hand against Hijikata’s back, which just served to squash a few fireflies onto his jacket.

“It’s amazing a guy as old as you still believes in ghosts,” he said. “Are you also one of those people that takes vacations to remote areas so you can try and get photo ops with bigfoot and the lizard people?”

“I-I was just pretending to believe in ghosts to make you feel better, since you brought them up,” Hijikata spat. “And don’t call them lizard people. You learned that they were actually members of that really weird, culty Amanto race called the Kyuanan when all the rest of us did!”

Gintoki had learned no such thing. Learning things about the Amanto would require him to pay attention to their politics in the first place. He had found things like doing nothing and doing nothing while taking shits much more worthwhile.

“Whatever,” he said. “I know you’re just really scared about the ghosts and stuff, so let’s get you back home.”

“I’m not scared of anything,” Hijikata blustered. “You were the one who brought up ghosts because you’re scared of tying the knot with me! Admit it!”

Of course he wouldn’t.

Instead, he asked, “Why do you want to get married, again? Is there some tax benefit you’re looking for here?”

With something only those who knew him well would be able to classify as a smile, Hijikata said, “Hardly. Putting you and taxes in the same room doesn’t turn out well for anyone.”

Damn straight.

“I’m doing this for the same reason anyone does, and I’ve already told it to you a thousand times before,” Hijikata insisted into the night. “I love you. What’s it going to take for you to actually believe me this time?”

Gintoki simply thought back to the words spoken on this very hill two and half years ago.

_I hate that I know there will never be anyone else._

A truth acknowledged through grief: beyond the late Okita Mitsuba, there would never be another. Hijikata had known that then, and it was why Gintoki had no reason to believe him now.

“Oh, but I do,” he said. “I do believe you, my dear Hijikata-kun.”

The surprise had Hijikata blinking. His mouth was open enough that a firefly grasped the opportunity, sending him choking.

“You do?” he managed, red-faced. “Well, of course you do. Which means, as long as you feel the same way, marriage it is.”

“If you want,” Gintoki agreed.

After all this time, he still had no idea why Hijikata wanted to shack up with him in particular, but it didn’t really make any difference. The fact of the matter was that this is what Hijikata wanted to do, and Gintoki would let him. Gintoki had apparently been of the mind to let him for two and a half years now, even while he had buried the sentiment in a shallow, but solid grave.

He held out his hand, and Hijikata clasped it gently, leaving enough room for the firefly lighting up the space within the cage of their grip to survive. After shaking the light up and down, they let it go.

It was a long walk back into and through town, but it sped quickly by, filled with grins, light insults, and laughter. The good mood was easily bolstered by more sake they collected for toasts at one bar after another. Drunk and high on their plans, they staggered up the stairs to Gintoki’s place to greet a bemused Kagura.

Gintoki picked her up and twirled her around in the air.

“Ka-gu-ra-chan,” he sang. “Guess who’s getting hitched?”

“Catherine,” she declared impishly, but her grin gave her away.

“I guess that is more likely than the truth,” he admitted, “which is me. Me and that guy!”

He gestured to Hijikata, who was wearing a proud smile of his own. He seemed genuinely happy and warm in this moment. Here in this place.

Gintoki couldn’t understand it, and was left staring across what felt like the space between the Earth and its moon. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of emptiness, and no bridge between it all. Kagura clasped her hand around his wrist and held it.

“Are you sure?” she asked just loud enough for him to hear.

He snorted.

“Yeah,” Gintoki said. “Think of the government salary.”

Kagura tilted her head in a non-committal way. After a beat, she let his wrist go. Gintoki used it to take another drink, letting the fire sink warm into his belly.

“Yeah,” he said again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Stranded Lullaby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOtTTkVuCwA)
> 
> *Credit goes to [Gata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gata) for figuring out the perfect time for an appropriate callback to Kids Who Don't Play With Trains.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Maybe the real ghosts were the ones inside us all along.”  
Katsura Kotarou  
_Not a father, a husband, or much of a successful career man, but he sure was something._  
_Also, he died as he lived, spouting shit that no one cares about._

“Gintoki! Gintoki,” Zura said, and continued to say, as he slid into Gintoki’s side of the booth, looking at him urgently, shaking his shoulder with the focused fury of someone about to give a soft drink to his sworn enemy. “How could I be killed in a summary? It wasn’t even the summary to the story in its entirety; it was just a chapter summary, and an insulting one at that! What could I have done to deserve such a dismissive, careless sending-off?”

“Yeah,” Gintoki replied vaguely, as he stared intently at his plate. “Anyway, I’m busy.”

“Of course. You must be incredibly busy planning my funeral, because I am dead!” Zura threw his hands up in the air, a pair of his fingers very closely missing flipping Gintoki’s plate in one of the most anxiety-inducing seconds Gintoki had ever experienced. “How did I even die? The summary doesn’t explain. Mine is the equivalent of an off-screen death where the camera pans away, you hear me scream, and I am never mentioned again!”

“That’s not true,” Kagura spoke up, taking a break from staring solemnly at Gintoki’s plate. “The summary says that you died while shitting. You’re just like Elvis now!”

After considering this new perspective, looking almost ready to take the compliment, Zura shook his head.

“I cannot accept that, Leader,” he insisted. “From the looks of the summary, it sounds more like some people got tired of my profound, knowledgeable statements and decided it was time to give me the boot.”

Zura sat back in the booth with a harrumph, arms folded.

“When I was tasked with presenting an inordinate proportion of the deep, mysterious meaning hidden within this story, did I complain? No! I did my part unflinchingly and with a dramatic flair no one else could manage. If I’m gone, who will be around to say the occasionally pointed, elegant statements that foreshadow events and imply that mysterious hidden truths are everywhere? Who will be the sole character expertly guiding the plot in the right direction? Is that a burden you could truly handle, Shinpachi-kun?”

Not letting his gaze stray from Gintoki’s plate, Shinpachi said, “Leave me out of this, please.”

“Or, since this is the final part of the story, have you all decided that hints, subterfuge, and gentle worldbuilding are no longer needed at this point, and so in moving toward a more straightforward tale you have decided to kill the character that most strongly represents refined grace and subtlety?”

No one responded.

After a moment, Zura coughed into his hand awkwardly and asked, “So why are you all looking at a plate with two eggs and a mackerel?”

“We’re just trying to figure out how to make this food last us for two years – maybe twenty,” Gintoki replied woodenly. “I ran into some debts that have me paying more back in a month than I would make at my normal rate in… let’s say three hundred and fifty years, so we have to cut back some. I’m thinking if we just cut each piece of mackerel and egg in half every day, eating one half and leaving the other for tomorrow, we’ll never quite run out.”

Kagura and Shinpachi nodded along grimly.

“Didn’t you just get cherry-boyed to a government employee? Surely your chosen cherry excels at stockpiling money brazenly stolen from the masses.”

That had certainly been Gintoki’s assumption. He had figured that the one good thing about being married to someone who didn’t actually want to be married to him was the tax-thief-by-proxy benefits. It was why he had felt more than comfortable drinking and gambling away more money than he had ever had in the days after his official cherrying. It had been that or spend the evenings at home without any distractions to keep him from feeling stuff he hadn’t quite figured out how to smash back down just yet.

Now that he was thinking about it, it was easy to realize that every part of this was that guy’s fault.

“He’s in just as much debt, because he spent all his money and then some trying to make a liar out of me,” Gintoki replied, “but I’m an honest man. A dirt-poor, but truly honest man. You all can see that.”

Kagura and Shinpachi both made a very real choice not to nod along grimly.

No one said anything for a very long time.

“Well, it seems like the three of you have far bigger problems than I do right now. You should have stopped me from ranting. Now I feel guilty,” Zura muttered.

“As you should,” Gintoki agreed. “I’m happy to accept apologies in the form of ca –”

A foot kicked him roughly under the table.

“We all have our problems. You got killed off as a footnote, we’re a step away from owing all the money that ever existed… What’s the point in comparing?” Kagura offered, still not looking up from the plate.

“There must be a way I can help,” Zura said, seeming to ponder it for a moment, before slamming the table triumphantly. “We could ask Summary-dono if you and I could trade places.”

Gintoki finally looked up from his last supper.

“What do you mean?”

“We could kill you off instead of me. Death would be the end of your debts.”

Huh. It sounded pretty stupid, but he hadn’t heard any better ideas coming from anyone else.

“Why not?” Gintoki said.

Summary:

###### 

“Why not?”  
Cherry-Boy Gintoki  
_A husband, kind of a father, and a terrible business owner, so there was that._  
_He died as he lived, agreeing to –_

“Now wait a second,” Shinpachi exclaimed. “Don’t just go killing yourself off like that! What about us?”

“You’re right, Shinpachi,” Kagura said, nodding. “We should really be a part of it. You’d better include us, Summary-chan!”

Summary:

###### 

“You’d better include us, Summary-chan!”  
Cherry-Girl Kagura and Friends  
_A group of people, you know._  
_They died as they lived, because… whatever._

“Oi! Stop putting so much pressure on the Summary. You can tell it’s obviously not feeling good about this,” Shinpachi snapped.

“That last attempt was rather lackluster,” Zura agreed. “Maybe it simply needs more incentive.”

Zura got up from the booth and walked toward the beginning of the chapter. He gently pushed aside the first few lines of the narrative, so he had room to crouch next to the Summary. Cupping one hand to shield his lips, he leaned forward and whispered.

Summary:

###### 

“If you help us at this juncture, I can promise you 20% of the cut, Summary-dono.”  
Katsura Kotarou  
_Someone who tried to bribe a literary device._  
_He died because people like that deserve it._

“Oi! I thought we were getting along! How could you betray my trust like that?” Zura snapped, flinching away from the top of the page

“What did you think would happen when you told a secret to something whose entire purpose is to convey information?” Shinpachi asked in exasperation. “And what ‘cut’? What is being cut in this scenario?”

“It better not be my mackerel,” Gintoki growled, while Kagura immediately jumped in to correct, “_Our _mackerel.”

Grimacing, Zura tried, “If I expunged your debt for a fifth of your fish, could you truly be angry with me?”

Gintoki absolutely could. A mackerel on the plate was infinitely better than a hypothetical, debt-free future in the bush.

“You know why you were killed off at the start of this chapter, Zura?”

“It’s not Zura; it’s Katsura.”

“It’s not because of your words or super secret meaning or whatever. It’s because you have always been the reason the main character hasn’t gotten food,” Gintoki proclaimed, pointing aggressively. “_You _stole my ramen in Chapter 2. _Y__ou_ didn’t dish out any meat buns in Chapter 4. Now _you _are trying to take away the one mackerel left to me in this world. If there’s anything you add to this plot, it’s only what you subtract from my stomach!”

“I gave you tea!”

“Only when I didn’t want any! When I asked for some, you refused like an asshole.”

“That’s not – ”

Everyone paused as a large crack erupted from the top of the page.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A CHAPTER WHERE NO ONE DIES AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR SHITTY DECISIONS AND POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. GODDAMN.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter would go well with anything – wine, capri sun, rain caught in a garbage bag – just get yourself something to drink. It is important to stay hydrated. Also, this thing chugs along with chapters 8-13 of Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains.

Some days, the only thing that made drowning in debt and being hounded by the whole of Edo for entering into the first ever Shogun-sanctioned union worth it was knowing that Hij-

… Uh.

What name could he go with here? T-dog? Toshkosh B’gosh? The asshole formerly known as Oogushi? Gintoki wasn’t sure what he was supposed to call him now, but it sure as hell wasn’t Hijikata anymore. The Shogun himself had taken that name along with Gintoki’s inimitable Sakata and provided them both with a Cherry-Boy in their stead.

While it may now technically be correct to think of that guy as Mr. Cherry-Boy, it was a big no-no. Gintoki would only say that name directly to his face, when the humiliation Gintoki caused was just enough to drown out the humiliation he felt.

Spoken fighting words were fine, but he hadn’t found a good solution for his thoughts at this point, which meant that asterisks would have to do the job for now.

So, from the top: Some days, the only thing that made drowning in debt and being hounded by the whole of Edo for entering into the first ever Shogun-sanctioned union worth it was knowing that ******** was going through the same slew of shit that he was. Maybe that was what marriage was really all about: mutual suffering. Til death do we part hernias.

Or, that was what he would say if anybody asked.

For the first few days of their new, Cherry-Boy life, ******** was like a rabid hyena under house arrest. His chief gorilla wouldn’t let him work or squat at the Shinsengumi barracks, so ******** mainly settled for avoiding the public eye by glowering on Gintoki’s couch, oversmoking his welcome, and shooting death lasers out of his eyes at anyone who got too close.

Shinpachi and Kagura were smart enough to keep some distance during that time, leaving it to Gintoki to grab an old Jump! and slump down onto the cushion next to the coiled spring of vibrating stress. Gintoki would turn a few pages then they would get into a mild argument or two then Gintoki would turn a few more pages then they would take turns trying to outdo the other’s wild declaration of love and devotion. Gintoki would win those fights without even trying.

On a day when the steam coming out of ********’s ears combined with the smoke coming out of his cigarettes had turned every physical feature of the Yorozuya HQ into the before version of ‘Who’s That Pokemon?’, the vague silhouette of ******** ripped out his own cigarette, gnashed his teeth, and snapped, “I’m no good to anyone like this.”

“No one’s asking you to be,” Gintoki replied, and flipped another page under what felt like a heavy gaze tearing into his side, but it was impossible to tell with those levels of anger and pollution.

By the second week, Kagura got ******** to laugh a genuine laugh. It wasn’t an overblown guffaw or anything big like that, but the soft chuckles that came out were real enough to part the clouds for a moment. Gintoki hadn’t heard what Kagura had said to get ******** going, but he had tuned in just in time for the laughter. A couple nights later, a few drinks deep, Gintoki had gotten an even bigger one.

Not that it was a competition or anything.

A month into the Cherry-Boy Era and ******** had become a active member of the household. His name was on the chore wheel, so it was now official.

******** had taken to looking on as Shinpachi dusted, occasionally filling the silence of the task with high-handed advice about girls and the otaku lifestyle that would have Shinpachi blushing in extreme embarrassment and poorly contained fury respectively; ******** would go on walks with Kagura and she would always come back with chocolate or sprinkles or some other envious dust on her lips even though he always claimed to never have any money these days; and ******** would take a brush to Sadaharu in some quiet moments that would usually end with the dog biting his head down to the neck, but Gintoki knew the difference between Sadaharu’s playful nips and death chomps, having been on the receiving end of both far too many times.

As for himself, Gintoki looked forward to the nights. When Shinpachi had left for the day, and Kagura and Sadaharu had gone to bed, it was just the two cherries taking up space. Usually ******** was too busy pretending to be his loving husband to hold any semblance of a good conversation, but Gintoki hardly minded. There was something nice about getting to be next to the person he wanted to be next to, even if that person didn’t actually want to be anywhere near him at all.

Like a good pair of married cherries, they slept in the same futon nowadays. From the very first night, a firm, unbreakable routine was established. They would lie down shoulder to shoulder, ******** as tense and irritable as should have been expected 30 years down the line of a marriage not 30 days, and then Gintoki would wait. He wouldn’t have to wait too long – nothing more than a couple minutes at most. That was how much time it took for the stiffness in ********’s shoulders to fall away as he shifted fully into sleep.

Hearing the evening, deepening breaths, Gintoki would roll onto his side, throw out his arm and pull ******** to him. He wouldn’t be satisfied until he had created a four-legged, four-armed eldritch abomination, with his nose resting deep in a forest of straight black hair.

******** always let him do this right until he woke up to realize it had happened. Gintoki was fine with a disgusted elbow-jab to the neck in the morning if he was allowed to be selfish at night. A few hours of honesty in a day felt good, even if the recipient happened to be asleep for all of it.

* * *

While ******** had already left for work long ago and Kagura was still fast asleep, Gintoki yawned and scratched an asscheek as he lounged on the couch, watching as Shinpachi plugged in the nuclear fission machine he had borrowed from a friend’s house for the very purpose of preparing breakfast. It was his turn to halve the eggs and mackerel that morning.

Putting on some safety glasses atop his glasses, logically protecting the most vulnerable part of his body, Shinpachi placed the three petri dishes containing the remaining egg and mackerel molecules into the machine’s inner chamber, flipped some switches, and carefully started rotating some knobs.

In the silence broken only by the occasional hum and beep from the fission machine, Shinpachi suddenly said, “There’s got to be a better way.”

“I could get you a knife, if you want,” Gintoki offered. “But we were dealing with quantum fluctuations five days ago that weren’t letting me get a clean cut, and I don’t think any knife could do any better now that we’re four halvings past that.”

“No, I mean,” Shinpachi tried, cursing under his breath at an angry beep from the machine before continuing, “can’t you just ask Cherry-Boy-san nicely? I’m sure he’d help out if he knew we’ve had to resort to eating subatomic particles.”

When Shinpachi had followed the logical course of action of changing his way of referring to ******** with his new last name, the biggest surprise of all was that ******** had actually let him do it.

“I’ve told you before: he’s in as big of financial trouble as we are,” Gintoki said rolling lazily onto his back. “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear if he had gotten his own fission machine to turn his last mayonnaise bottle into one that keeps on giving.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to just waste all of his money. What could he have spent it on? You said it was to make a liar out of you, but you never really explained that.”

Otae hadn’t told him? Gintoki had seen enough of her on the rooftop and in the restaurant that day to know she had played a stupidly instrumental part in the whole stupid business.

Well, she hadn’t told Gintoki to keep it a secret and he didn’t see any point in hiding it from Patsuan anymore – not now that the boys were cherried. It had made their dating fight club into a married fight club, which had transformed the club activities from things like passive aggressively hijacking dogshit eating competitions into things like passive aggressively ‘forgetting’ to do the dishes and yelling at each other to stop staying out so late. It was different enough from before that Gintoki didn’t see the problem with a little honesty now.

“The afternoon before that guy and I tied the knot, he went all-in on his bet that I was just faking my beautiful love and devotion. He hired a pricey Ketsuno Ana lookalike to try and get me to break. You can see how well that worked out for him.”

Pausing in his careful knob-turning, Shinpachi took off his safety glasses, so he could give Gintoki a long, pointed look with his standard glasses.

“Sure, I may have been fooled at the beginning, but are you meaning to tell me that Cherry-Boy-san thought you were just playing some stupid game by being with him for _half a year_?” Shinpachi’s exasperation knew no bounds. He grumbled under his breath until hitting a moment of sudden revelation. “Does he _still_ think that? Does he still think you’re playing around even now that you’re married?”

Gintoki picked his nose as he looked up at the ceiling.

“Probably,” he said.

“_Probably_?! PROBABLY?” Shinpachi exploded. “You have to set things straight! You have to tell him!”

Eyeing the nuclear fission machine as his stomach growled, Gintoki found himself already regretting telling the truth. This was as good of a proof as any that nothing good ever came of it.

“I speak words of love to him all the time. I don’t know what else you want me to do,” he said. “But I do know what I want _you _to do: split some atoms so we can have breakfast.”

Ignoring Gintoki’s desperate entreaty, Shinpachi replied, “You obviously haven’t been telling him in a way he understands. You could do it if you really tried; I know you could, and it’s way past the point where you should have.”

Maybe Gintoki should just split the atoms himself while the kid had his crisis. There was probably an instruction manual on mackerel-specific nuclear fission around here somewhere.

“Oh,” Shinpachi breathed. His eyes were wide and terrifically sad. “You don’t want him taking you seriously, because... you don’t think _he’s _serious.”

While Gintoki was undeniably hungry, it seemed like breakfast just might not be in the cards this morning. He got up to throw on his shirt and pants.

“Gin-san,” Shinpachi said.

As he laced his boots, he caught Shinpachi staring at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Don’t do this to yourself. Things can’t just stay like this.”

Gintoki slid open the door and stepped out into the morning, pointedly ignoring the ardent cries of “The Cherry-Boy rises!” and “The Cherry-Boy blesses us!” from Shogun fanboys and girls camping outside of his place. Digging a hand into his pockets, he found an old, crumpled up napkin from his last trip through the bars in Kabukicho. Taking it out and squinting at the lines drawn in pen, he realized Shinpachi was right.

Change was in order. A lot of change.

* * *

It was right about two months later that Gintoki found he had enough change – mostly 100 and 500 yen coins – to fill a pillowcase and turn it into an ultimate weapon, which meant Shinpachi could return that nuclear fission machine to his friend. The Yorozuya household was getting some primo-delicious shabu-shabu tonight.

“You mean, that means I don’t have to get the cheapest thing on the menu? You mean it?” Kagura exclaimed, sticking on words in her excitement.

“Everything on any menu is cheap to us now,” Gintoki exclaimed gleefully, puffing up his chest in his custom Cherry-Boy shirt, which happened to be the most desired item on any market. “I’m a _brand_, and not just one where B**dai never figures out how to create the merch that fans actually want this time around.”

Maybe there was something to be said for this marriage thing after all – particularly when the Shogun had made his popular enough that tens of thousands of people were willing to buy over-priced clothing referencing it. Hasegawa’s casual drawing on that bar napkin of a Cherry-Boy T-shirt design had been worth its weight in gold hundreds of times over. Gintoki had never been this far into the green before, and he was loving every second of it. Lording his money over everyone else was particularly fun. He understood why rich people did that now.

“I’ll even pay for your meal too, as I am the generous breadwinner of this household,” he said to ******** with the patronizing smile of a feudal lord having office hours with some of his peons.

******** glared up at him from where he was hunched over at Gintoki’s desk, having commandeered the space for after-hours paperwork over the past week. A grumble emerged from his corner of the room that just as easily could have been his throat as it could have been his stomach. It was impossible to tell which one at this point.

“You’re not getting me to wear the damn shirt,” ******** said.

He would though. Gintoki would wear him down into wearing it eventually.

“That’s fine. I’m wearing enough of it for the both of us, and I’m fine with doing all the heavy lifting. You can just come along and reap the benefits of my hard work, as any spouse should when they are married to a gigantic success.”

Gintoki would feed ******** a good-ass meal and make him feel inferior at the same time. It didn’t get much better than that.

“What Gin-san is _trying_ to say,” Shinpachi rudely interjected, “is that he cares about you and wants your company.”

Ever since their little spat over breakfast molecules, Shinpachi had been glaring at Gintoki from across any room they were in and pulling shit like this. The kid needed to get over his temper tantrum, because Gintoki was feeling less and less like dealing with it.

“I know exactly what he’s trying to say,” ******** replied unaffected, “which makes it easy for me to say I’m busy. Take your charity somewhere else.”

Throwing his hands up in an easy surrender, Gintoki said, “You heard the man. He’s too busy to spend any time with us. It’s almost as if he doesn’t care about us as much as we do about him.”

“It’s true,” Kagura agreed. “Mami 4 never gives me as much devoted attention as he is giving that sheet of paper. It’s times like these that make me think he’s just faking the whole thing.”

******** had gotten up and made a grab for his coat before Kagura had finished her retort. It was just that easy.

“You know it’s not like that, and I’ll prove it to you,” he blustered.

* * *

After the initial excitement of having money died down, Gintoki found life remained much the same. It was just a lot easier to do any and every thing, that was all. He never had to procrastinate on eating or cutting his hair; there was always enough paper to buy paper to wipe his ass even without stacking together a legendary shiny coupon combo; there were no more murderous robots in his face in the morning now that he always had a fluffy rent stack to slide across Otose’s counter; and his relationship with the Yoshiwara crew suddenly ran a lot smoother since he could afford to give Seta his requisite gold bar at the New Year.

Pretty much everyone was a lot nicer to him now, except for Hasegawa who kept asking for his cut. Gintoki could only tell him to stay away from his mackerel so many times.

Then, on the other side of the spectrum, there was ********, who straight-out refused any financial support for his debts from what he had called ‘the shitty shirt slush fund.’

Not that Gintoki had actually wanted to help him out or anything.

Instead, Gintoki fell into a brand shiny new routine supported by his new-found riches that he called: doing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted to.

This mostly meant running his T-shirt kiosks with Shinpachi and Kagura at busy places throughout the city, while still accepting the occasional Odds Jobs assignment when he felt like it. Strangely enough, the less money the client had to offer, the more he was inclined to accept these days.

His evenings hadn’t changed much. Sometimes the booze he drank was a little more expensive and the slots he played were a little more shiny, but gambling and booze in a pretty dress was still, at the end of the day, gambling and booze.

Even with his regularly late nights, he still sometimes felt like getting up early in the mornings. When the first rays of sunlight were filtering their way down to the floor through his windows, he would yawn and putter his way down the hall to the bathroom. Swaying dangerously above the toilet he would do his business to the faint smell of smoke wafting in from outside. He would flush, shuffle back into the hallway, and look toward his door to see the silhouette of a person holding a cigarette on his balcony.

Gintoki would stand there in a dull, groggy haze for a while, cough out some morning phlegm, and then cook something warm for breakfast that would transform the phantom at his door into a fully-formed man in his living room. As the days went by, he found he did this more and more often, and then even more often to the extent that it became a Pavlovian routine.

Shinpachi never called him out on it outright, but he did snark and stare. The more he looked at Gintoki, the less he said. Their relations frosted to the point that even Kagura poked her nose into it.

“Whatever you did to Shinpachi, you should apologize,” she said to him suddenly after her fifteenth shirt sale of the day.

“I didn’t do anything,” he replied as a knee-jerk reflex.

“I would prefer you did something though,” Shinpachi emphasized from his place waving a sign in front of their kiosk.

“I am doing a whole lot of things, which is why we have money now. Some people call me a _mogul_,” Gintoki boasted, handing a family of four four differently-sized Cherry-Boy T-shirts. “You should be grateful for everything I am doing.”

“I would trade in everything you’re currently doing in an instant if it got you to stop doing nothing about the other thing.”

Gintoki didn’t have a response to that.

He didn’t see why it mattered. Everything could just stay as it was and that would be enough.

* * *

Elizabeth waddled calmly into the hospital waiting room as if it wasn’t wall-to-wall filled with just about every Shinsengumi lackey that had ever graced a page or frame of Gintama and lived to tell about it. To the creature’s credit, not one of them seemed to notice. They were all too busy clenching their teeth and clenching their fists and just clenching in general. It must have to do with how their vice-boss was busy dying on an operating table after having his fateful run-in with… Miasma? Mitochondria? Gintoki had thrown the guy head-first into a wall, but he still couldn’t remember his name.

Well, who the bad guy was was hardly as important as who he had run through with his sword. Not that importance had made a difference when it came to what Gintoki did and could do about the whole thing, which was nothing. Not a damn thing.

Emptily, he watched Elizabeth shuffle toward him and thrust a laptop into his blood-stained lap.

It held up a sign that said: ‘Answer the questions.’

With the message conveyed, the thing exited the room the same way it had come in, leaving Kagura and Shinpachi to crowd into his space, all three of them looking at the words on the computer screen.

Sniffing up a snot trail and rubbing her eyes, Kagura asked, “Why is someone asking about whether it’s you or Mami 4 that top the character popularity polls? Haven’t they been keeping up with the manga?”

* * *

******** was recovering. He had been pummeled and cut into enough ribbons that someone could have made a high-protein dress out of his entrails, and he still didn’t kick a single bucket. Gintoki wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he wasn’t complaining. Based on hastily made bets in the middle of battle, ******** was now required to wear The Shirt™ for an entire year. Not much could be better than that.

There were just two more days until ******** was scheduled to be released from the hospital, and Gintoki was getting fidgety. Kagura probably would have given him shit for all the idle wandering around the place he had been doing in the middle of the night if she’d been home, but she wasn’t. Over the past week, she would only occasionally show up for a meal or a change of clothes, smelling distinctly of disinfectant, before rushing out the door again.

While Kagura was the barnacle that had momentarily peeled off the Jolly Boat Yorozuya, Shinpachi was the barnacle that had firmly attached in her place. He seemed reluctant to leave Gintoki alone during this time, arriving at Yorozuya HQ far earlier than usual, and sticking around far later. Only the moon was sometimes around to illuminate Patsuan’s back on its commute to and from the office.

When Gintoki had mentioned that attachment issues in this stage of puberty were normal, but that he should try not to draw them out, Shinpachi had just looked at him. There was no straight-man fury or other reactionary emotion. There was no frustration or exasperation. His face was carefully blank as he looked at Gintoki from where he was sitting on the couch next to him. After a moment, he slowly turned back to his magazine: Super Otsu Online Weekly – Now In Print! – Vol 83.

As he flipped a page, he said, “He’s really going to be okay. You know that.”

Gintoki grumbled out a mixture of nonsense and vague denials as he turned away and back to the TV.

He managed to get his right leg to stop bouncing up and down half-way into an exposé on the illegal drugs making their way into some of the snail racing scenes. That was also right around the time Kagura dashed into the room looking, for lack of any lighter term, devastated.

Gintoki knew where she’d been and who she’d been with. Of course he did. And now she looked like that, which could only mean –

“He was spying on us.”

His heart started beating again.

“A lot of people get obsessed with the lives of the rich and famous, of which we are now both, so I’m not surprised,” he said, struggling to casually hide his overwhelming relief. “Anyway, who are we talking about?”

“Ma – no, that Shinsengumi _asshole_,” she spat. “I was with him in his hospital room when some big hotshot came to take him away to report on you: the Shiroyasha. He’s been doing all this, all along… he became your Cherry-Boy just to follow some shitty orders!”

Shinpachi dropped his magazine.

“That’s… it can’t be right. It can’t be.”

“He tricked us. The piece-of-shit took us for a ride and now I wanna take his nose for one!”

Kagura shoved two fingers roughly up into the air, clearly having chosen anger to drown any softer emotions.

“For all this time?” Shinpachi asked, still looking profoundly shocked. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Sure he would,” Gintoki said, letting yet another wave of relief catch him. “It’s his job.”

For the first time in a long time, everything made sense. While he hadn’t known what it was all about, Gintoki had been so sure, since the very beginning, that it hadn’t been business. Now, he was still thinking he had been half-right.

If some big suit way up there had known some stuff about Gintoki’s past and had done their due diligence looking into which of their mooks on the ground ever got the closest to the ‘Shiroyasha’ these days, it would have been a simple decision to summon ******** and order him to get closer. It wouldn’t have needed to be an order to spy or assassinate or anything official like that. If he had to bet, Gintoki would put his chips on one of ********’s superiors discreetly asking him to make a friend. For business, he had been asked to get personal.

And then ******** would have stupidly taken it to the next level with his bullshit declarations of love. In that idiot’s head, of course that would be the simplest way to get close to someone.

Although, Gintoki had to hand it to him. In a year’s time, ******** had never given away the game even once. It was more credit than he’d been willing to give the dumbass, but now it seemed as though ample credit was more than due.

Shinpachi and Kagura had fallen silent at his statement. Both of them looked like they wanted to say something, but their lips remained pressed tightly together, zippering up their mouths.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he said to them, “I doubt he was happy about it.”

Biting her lip until it bled, Kagura’s anger fell away to reveal her pain, just for a moment.

“It doesn’t help at all,” she said. “I saw his face when that man talked to him. I saw how sad he was, even when he tried to hide it, but being sad about doing a bad thing doesn’t change what you’ve done!”

Not completely, but it did shift the scales a bit.

Gintoki knew what it meant to be forced between either doing something bad or worse. He knew that the world was more complex than good people doing good things and bad people doing the rest. Everyone got their share of grays and tough decisions.

Usually he got to be lazy enough to just judge the actions in front of him and react accordingly, but this time Gintoki knew the person. He had known the person for far too long and in enough ways that he unfortunately understood. There were thousands of punches and hundreds of drinks and enough laughter to carry them from one to the other that gave him the power to understand.

He remembered the ghost of a smile he had seen on the top of a remote hill on the outskirts of the city one night, and remembered how he had seen a man that had given everything, all of it away in his service, regardless of the phantoms that gathered, dogging his steps and his shadow, there to prick away at him whenever he looked.

At the end of the day, ******** would do what he needed to do for Kondo and for the Shinsengumi, and Gintoki understood that.

“Well, it seems like we should get to work,” he said.

The kids looked at him in confusion.

Gintoki stood up and stretched. Cracking his back as he walked over to his desk, he prepared to call in a few favors.

“Now we know who we’ve been dealing with for the past year: a client,” he declared to two pairs of widening eyes. “The Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi has a job he’s been needing us to do, and the Yorozuya is finally ready to provide that service.”

* * *

It was only a good couple of hours later that Sakata Lardbucket was dead and buried in the collective imaginations of all who had pretended to know him. As rush jobs went, this had been a pretty good one, if Gintoki did say so himself. He paid his respects to the empty grave with one last solemn huff.

Not only did this automatically pull ******** out of whatever year-long, rancid shit-pile he had dug himself into; it also meant random nosy bureaucrats would stop bugging Gintoki about his past. The mythos of ‘Shiroyasha’ was knocked out of the equation alongside Lardbucket in the best two-for-one deal Gintoki had stumbled upon in a long time.

All things considered, he was feeling pretty good. He had buried a lot of stuff on top of this hill just now, and throwing his farce of a marriage onto the pile seemed opportune.

For better and worse, richer and poorer, sickness and anger, this is where it ended. He smiled a ghost of a smile that he had seen once, then one more time on the mouth of another, but now it possessed his lips for just a moment. He let out a breath in a white cloud that could just as easily have been a spirit escaping from his mouth to the sky.

He felt okay.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw ********, Kagura, and Shinpachi in the middle of a tense conversation. It seemed as good of a time as any to reinvent the status quo.

As he walked their way, he just managed to overhear Kagura snapping, “As long as we understand each other.”

“Understand what?” Gintoki asked, standing casually before the group. “Are we talking about understanding how amazing I am to think up such an incredible plan on such short notice?”

********’s lips thinned slightly, but his otherwise calm, serious expression didn’t change. This only seemed to further infuriate Kagura, who was obviously looking for some high-class groveling right about now.

“I still don’t understand why you won’t let me kick the stuffing out of this cop scum,” she growled to drive the point home.

Unfortunately for her, Gintoki had another point he wanted to make. That point was the period at the end of the sentence. Now that ******** had served his sentence for his mission, it was time to finish the story and send him on his way.

Gathering every piece of anger he could slash himself bloody with, Gintoki let himself turn vicious: “You’ve got to take pity on him. He was ordered to spy on me and he did it so stupidly that now everyone is mad at him. I bet he’s hated all the time he’s had to spend with us, and it’s only my genius plan that got him out of it.”

He threw out his arms – the ringmaster in the spotlight, grandiosely posturing his way to the end of a show.

“Congratulations!” The words dripped out of him. “Your Cherry-Boy torture has ended. You’re welcome to lick my boots in gratitude.”

And that was enough. All of that was surely enough to let ******** know that they could just go back to the way things were a year ago. They could snap at each other when they crossed paths in the street, they could argue about pointless things, and occasionally, reluctantly pair up to save the day during story arcs when the plot called for it. They could be rivals, frenemies, whatever. They could. Gintoki could do that. Unlike ********, now that he knew where his own ghosts were, he felt no need to seek them out. He could keep the wisps of memories and the desires they carried as solidly buried as the cousin he had never had.

A drink didn’t have to be shared – nor a futon, nor a life.

That smile would haunt him no longer.

As if summoned by his thoughts, ********’s mouth found the very shape.

Lips were pressed firmly together, but stretched wide and upward. Eyelids were hooded over a gaze much gentler than their owner ever would have allowed of his own volition, with nearby skin scrunched along faintly defined laugh lines. It was cheerful – almost annoyingly upbeat in how it naturally broadcast relief –, but alongside all of that there was an undercurrent of…

“You’re right. We should end it,” he said. “I never wanted any of this to happen.”

It didn’t make sense. ******** wasn’t supposed to be smiling that smile at him. That smile was for lonely, shadowed hilltops used as metaphorical doorways to tragic pasts; not for stupidly crowded hilltops made overly bright from highly reflective snow on a clear-ass day. Sure, Gintoki had thought he had seen that smile aimed in his direction in that bar the day all of this had started, but he had chalked that up to a hallucination caused by too much alcohol mixed with too much baggage he’d refused to acknowledge.

Right here, right now, the same expression ******** had worn when he had said, “I hate that I know there will never be anyone else,” was aimed directly, unwaveringly at him – _someone else –_, and Gintoki had no idea what to do with it.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he yelped. “Stop smiling at me like that. You don’t mean it.”

The smile grew big enough to encapsulate a year’s worth of devotion to a fight club that had, Gintoki was growing to realize, never been about secrets and fists in the first place. No, it was about the opposite of all of that.

“I do mean it,” ******** confirmed, seemingly ungodly determined to drive his goddamn point home. “That’s all this ever was, dumbass. I only ever wanted you to know that I love you. But since you’re too stupid to get that, this whole mess happened, so, actually, this is really all your fault.”

Gintoki’s mind was a blank as he reached forward. He grabbed ********’s shoulder, digging in with his fingers, finding him real.

“You mean that. You actually mean that.”

******** pushed his forehead solidly against Gintoki’s, and closed his eyes. It was a face, an expression that Gintoki had seen countless nights over the past few months. It was the look of someone at peace – a look near impossible for someone to wear sleeping next to someone they were fundamentally lying to. Of course it was. Of course this was what it was. It truly, absolutely couldn’t be anything else.

“Always,” ******** promised then stepped away and turned.

Gintoki stood where he was, watching the back retreat through the snow. He stood for a while longer.

“Um,” Shinpachi said, “Gin-san?”

He turned to find Shinpachi and Kagura still taking up the space right next-door. While Kagura seemed conflicted, Shinpachi was just plain irritated, and was directing a glaring, glinting pair of glasses directly toward him.

Well, that was embarrassing. They really shouldn’t be eavesdropping on adult conversations. They weren’t ready for that type of subject matter in their lives just yet.

“Do you wanna get some food?” he asked them as a blatant distraction, reaching into his pockets. “I will pay for a job well done… or, I would have if I had remembered my wallet. I think it’s on the kitchen counter – no, actually it’s definitely on Sadaharu’s head.”

“No, but _Gin-san_,” Shinpachi said his name again like it contained some sort of secret cue or hint he was supposed to be getting.

He grumbled and scratched his head roughly.

“You know you could pay for the meal and I could pay you back. I can actually do that sort of thing now,” Gintoki offered.

“You can, but you still don’t though,” Kagura added unhelpfully.

“But all of that is beside the point!” Shinpachi exclaimed. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it now?”

That wasn’t a discussion he was keen on having with his friendly neighborhood Patsuan.

“Not completely,” Kagura admitted, stepping in to fill his silence. “I thought Mami 4 cared about us then I thought he didn’t, but now it seems like he does again?”

“He cared the whole time,” Shinpachi replied firmly, “despite believing that Gin-san didn’t.”

Kagura suddenly looked at him like he had just taken his wallet off of Sadaharu’s head and viciously beaten the dog with it.

“You married him, while making him think you didn’t like him at all?”

“That’s not fair,” he exclaimed in his own defense.

“Why?” Shinpachi asked darkly.

“Because...” Gintoki trailed off then mumbled, “Because that’s what I thought _he _was doing.”

Kagura and Shinpachi looked at each other. After half a moment of silent communication they nodded and turned to face him. They each pulled their fist back and flung it forward in unison, giving Gintoki a twin pair of vicious uppercuts.

“GET IT TOGETHER, OLD MAN!”

Kagura’s fist slammed into the right side of his jaw, sending his head and brain flying to the left, while Shinpachi’s fist hit the left side of his jaw, sending his head and brain flying to the right. For a moment, his brain, squished from both sides, became a small and dense enough point that he visited the realm of his eggs and mackerel. However, he didn’t stay for long, because soon enough he was blinking away blinding light from the sun as his body rocketed toward it, up and up into the sky.

He flew for a good long while before crashing back down to Earth again.

* * *

The first thing Gintoki noticed about Bushu was that it was just as damn cold as the rest of Japan around this time of year. The storms had been heavy enough during the preceding nights that piles of snow buried the names carved into many of the gravestones. The cemetery’s caretaker obviously hadn’t gotten around to sweeping up just yet, which made the one grave clear of debris stand out among all the rest.

Hands in his pockets, Soichiro was standing casually in front of the immaculate gravesite – there to greet them after having run ahead up the path immediately after the group had disembarked from the train. He wasn’t visibly out of breath, but the ends of his uniform sleeves poking out of his pants pockets looked slightly damp.

“It took you long enough,” he said.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” the gorilla exclaimed. “We had to try a few stores. A lot of them were out of Mitsuba-dono’s favorite.”

He stepped forward and placed a big bag of the spiciest senbei around in front of her gravestone. Soichiro and ******** each stood at one of the gorilla’s shoulders, and the three of them took a solemn moment of silence.

Observing all of this from a respectful distance, Gintoki felt himself get poked in the ribs. It was Kagura’s annoying little finger.

“Isn’t this the time when you’re supposed to do something?” she spoke in what was a whisper for her, but was just a normal tone of voice for everyone else.

Gintoki grunted.

“If you don’t do something, I’ll make sure there’s another body for this cemetery before we leave,” Shinpachi snapped.

“Yeah, but it’s really cold though,” he said, rubbing his arms, which, instead of making anything warmer, only seemed to send the cold everywhere it hadn’t been before. “That was a long train ride, and the sun’s setting, right? The temperature’s dropping too fast and it’s _cold_.”

Gintoki sneezed.

Uncaring for his plight, the two kids pushed him forward. He stumbled through the snow, ending up next to Soichiro. The Shinsengumi trio turned to look at him. He chattered his teeth in greeting.

“Ah, that’s right,” the gorilla said, breaking the silence. “You had something you wanted to say to her, didn’t you?”

Given the opportunity, Gintoki sized up the grave in front of him then dropped to his knees. The cold caught his legs so quickly, he wasn’t sure if he was ever going to be able to get up again. He might just have to die as a winter graveland ice sculpture.

However, his goal was finally in reach. He snatched the bag of senbei, ripped it open, and scarfed down as many chips as he could fit in his mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” ******** exclaimed.

Those senbei were the only warmth available right now, so there was no way he wouldn’t go for them. Although, he hadn’t expected them to be quite _this_ spicy. His mouth was on fire.

“What gave you the idea that you could just take what belongs to my sister?” Soichiro asked in warning.

“Don’t worry,” Gintoki assured the blurry vision of Soichiro he could pick out through the tears and snot streaming down his face. “I’m giving her stuff in return.”

Despite – or, perhaps, because of – their incredible heat, Gintoki shoveled in another mouthful. He could feel every atom of his tongue being burned alive. If only that sensation would spread to his toes – if they weren’t already completely frostbitten.

“You think you have something she would want more than those senbei crackers?” ******** chimed in with a general derision.

“I do,” Gintoki agreed, but his tongue felt swollen enough that it seemed to come out more along the lines of ‘Ah doh.’

He turned so that his back was facing ******** and patted it.

“Ah dold ah Ide gib yu a piggy bah ride bah hum (I told her I’d give you a piggy back ride back home),” Gintoki declared.

********’s foot hit his ass hard enough to send him flying face first into the nearby snowbank. He took the opportunity to chew up a secret mouthful of mercifully chilled snow before getting up and shaking off.

“That was an even stupider response than I thought I would get, and I always make sure the bar is resting right on the floor when it comes to you,” ******** snarked.

“You must be so busy looking down at your low bar, which is why you never seem to notice me constantly exceeding all expectations,” Gintoki proclaimed, walking back toward the grave and kneeling in front of it. “The piggyback ride is for one cracker. I have other promises for the other ones.”

If he was being honest, Gintoki hadn’t been able to spend enough time with the woman in her last days to truly know much of her at all. He was far more familiar with her absence than her presence – the spaces she had left behind. He knew her most by how she was missed.

“For another cracker” he said, “I told her I would do your laundry sometimes if you were really busy and I had some free time. Then for the third, I let her know that I would tell you if there was a bug in your food that you weren’t noticing as long as we weren’t fighting.”

He primarily knew Okita Mitsuba through the ones she had cared for – the people she had loved. There were moments when he could measure the weight of her loss in others, and that was what ghosts were: nothing solid or tangible – simply monuments to relationships that had been.

“The fourth cracker was a doozy,” he admitted. “For that one, I told her that if you got pathetically sick and needed someone to wipe your ass for you, I would plug my nose and do it. And that fifth cracker was me promising I would make fun of you for it only once you got better.”

The dead, by design, were nothing at all, but they took form and shape through those that still loved them. It was to that shape that Gintoki made his promises when he spoke to ghosts.

“It went on like that for a while,” he said, “ because there were a whole lot of crackers. Here’s the last one.”

He took the final cracker out of the bag and held it out in the fading light. He tossed it up into the air and caught it with a snap of his teeth.

“For this last one,” he said, biting down with a quick swallow, “I’m telling her I’ll take care of you. If she’ll let me, I’ll take care of her... Toshirou.”

That last cracker felt as hot as all the others combined. He huffed out embers that joined a haze of cigarette smoke clouding the air above him.

“Those are some big words,” Toshirou said, kneeling next to Gintoki in front of the grave.

He wasn’t smiling at all, but there also was no frown. His eyes were clear and bright; they seemed to be taking in every part of the moment.

“Yeah, well, I was cold enough that I would have done anything for that bag of senbei,” Gintoki replied with a sniffle, but the snot had already frozen to his lip, so it didn't do much. “I was desperate, so I bargained with everything I had.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

“It is,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter is finally up! Thanks for your patience.
> 
> These are strange times we are currently living in, and if you happen to be stuck at home without much to do, I hope this has provided you a little entertainment in the meantime. Stay healthy; stay safe.
> 
> I'm currently hunkering down in quarantine myself. This seems like the time for virtual connection, so I actually made a tumblr. Not sure what I'll do with it, but you're welcome to get in contact. You can find me at gamechangeroo


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